On June 26, 2025, a tigress and her four cubs were found dead in Karnataka’s MM Hills Wildlife Sanctuary after consuming a poisoned cow carcass. The villagers had sprayed pesticide on the carcass of the cow that the tigress had killed.
Three villagers have been arrested for allegedly poisoning the carcass. Three forest officers have been sent on ‘compulsory leave’ for their administrative lapses. And, a high-level probe is ordered.
Retaliatory killings are not new, but this case is drawing attention because of the number of tigers that died. The fact that five healthy tigers — none of them injured, infirm, or conflict-prone — preyed on cattle and were killed points to a much deeper issue: The health of the tiger habitat itself.
Perhaps cattle had become the tigress's only food option in an overgrazed landscape, where wild prey populations have grown scarce. This underscores how India’s rapidly expanding human-dominated spaces have led to the marginalisation of wildlife.
Rights-based resource use and rapacious development together exert pressure on once-contiguous forests, now fragmented into shrinking tiger habitats. These degraded patches push wildlife into closer contact with people, and it is along these fault lines that conflict erupts. Conservation today is no longer just about protecting tigers; it’s about reimagining coexistence amid relentless anthropogenic pressure.
The ideological critique of fortress conservation — the model of strictly separating people from Protected Areas — has gained traction for its alleged exclusionary and colonial roots. But when this critique is stripped of ecological nuance, it risks obscuring the ground reality in India — and fostering conditions where neither people nor wildlife are secure.
India today is no longer the mosaic of wilderness and low-intensity human use that characterised its landscapes in earlier generations. Over 75 per cent of the land is under human use; less than 5 per cent lies within Protected Areas, and even these face growing anthropogenic pressures.
In this setting, tiger reserves — derided as ‘fortresses’ — are not elite enclaves but heirlooms held in trust for tomorrow, lifelines that support source populations of wide-ranging species. These species require inviolate cores and ecological corridors to survive, not as a matter of ideology, but as a biological imperative.
Livestock rearing remains an important livelihood near forested areas across India. Large holdings of unproductive cattle, coupled with the loss of village grazing lands, often compel grazers to enter forests. Yet livestock grazing is a recognised threat to wildlife: It reduces forage for wild ungulates and depresses their population, forcing predators to hunt livestock, which invites human retaliation.
MM Hills offers a case study where the familiar patterns of interactions take a more disturbing turn. According to Prajavani, non-local cattle owners now send thousands of heads into the forest to convert vegetation into dung. The dung is collected and sold. Thus emerges what locals call the “cow dung mafia.” Forest officers report intimidation, assaults, and widespread habitat destruction.
Cattle grazing is no longer about subsistence. It is about commerce and global markets. It is another commodity in the market-driven extraction of so-called minor forest produce. From biomass-rich dung to vitamin-rich amla, the scale of extraction is far beyond sustainable levels.
These patterns are symptoms of a deeper issue that cannot be slighted as ‘encroachments’. Studies show that people’s dependence on forest resources is often a response to their exclusion from both conservation spaces and formal markets. Where conservation offers no economic alternatives or meaningful rights, survival shifts into extractive informal economies that are unsustainable.
Cattle herding becomes a proxy for accessing biomass markets. But left unregulated, these economies devour the very ecosystems they depend on.
The often-romanticised vision of local communities as natural stewards ignores an uncomfortable truth: Communitarian values have eroded. Traditional norms of restraint and responsibility, and the trust that sustained them, have collapsed, replaced by opportunism and competitive harvesting.
Sustainable use requires a clearly defined regimen of harvest and regeneration: What can be used, how much, when and by whom. Without these, self-interest dominates. Ecological illiteracy compounds this: for example, people believing that morel mushrooms grow when lightning strikes may resort to overharvesting because they lack an understanding of the biology of spore cycles.
Grazing may seem benign. But when it displaces wild prey, damages habitat, or spreads disease, it becomes a vector of ecological degradation.
The Forest Department’s flaws — corruption, understaffing, apathy — are well known. Yet, since the 1970s, India’s forest governance has undergone a slow but significant transformation. Environmental protection has moved from colonial legacy to an Indian priority, shaped by local civil servants and ecologists. This change — however uneven — is not trivial. It is shaping conservation from within, drawing on ecological and cultural knowledge.
Rights-based movements have asserted 'Jal, Jungle, Zameen' for people. But these assertions emerged in specific contexts of disempowerment and conspicuously omitted 'Jaanwar' (wildlife). They focused on human claims rather than sustainability, and were ignorant of the ecological role of fauna in healthy ecosystems.
Community stewardship, too, is not automatic. It requires institutions, norms, and ecological awareness. Without them, replacing fortress conservation risks becoming a hollow ideological gesture.
Protected Areas today are under siege from both directions. From above: highways, mining, urban expansion. From below: grazing, firewood, dung, and distress economies. In between lies the wildlife — the orphan constituency — falling through the cracks.
If the poisoning of a mother tigress and her four cubs tells us anything, it is this: some spaces must be kept free from extractive use, however politically inconvenient that may be. Inviolate zones are not aesthetic elitism. They are functional necessities — for the survival of megafauna, for ecosystem services, and for climate resilience.
Community-based conservation remains a desirable model in principle. But in practice, it suffers from neglect. There is little serious policy backing, and very few NGO interventions focus on building the ecological literacy, governance capacity, and economic alternatives that true stewardship demands. Without that scaffolding, what’s promoted as community conservation often defaults to unregulated extraction.
Conservation justice must include honesty about scarcity, thresholds, and ecological limits. If we ignore how extractive survival economies arise from governance failure, we risk losing everything.
Cherry-picked success stories exist on both sides — fortress and community paradigms. The rest is dawdling incompetence: through this broken net, wild flora and fauna fall, driving ecosystems toward collapse.
What’s falling between the ideological cracks is not just policy — it is wildlife itself.
There are no quick fixes in environmental governance. The Forest Department — despite its flaws — still holds the legal mandate. Communities — despite their moral legitimacy — often lack the scaffolding for ecological stewardship.
What’s falling through these cracks in the battle for the reins is not just policy. It is wildlife. It is the future.
• What’s needed now is hard realism — science-informed, restorative, pragmatic
• Secure inviolate cores, not for ideology, but for ecological function
• Rebuild local governance by linking rights to responsibility
• Break extractive economies by creating regenerative alternatives
The tigress and her four cubs died not just from poison, but from a discourse too fractured to even see them vanish.
“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” — Aldo Leopold
Patil is a freelance writer. He writes on ecology, wildlife and nature conservation. He has worked for snow leopard conservation in Ladakh and on tiger population monitoring in central and south India. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.