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As media coverage of wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich reaches a crescendo, prominent wildlife historian Mahesh Rangarajan has told Down To Earth (DTE) that while wolf attacks on humans in India are a historical fact, the species itself usually stays away from people.
“Wolf attacks on humans are known and R S Dharmakumarsinh’s book Reminscences of Indian Wildlife (1970), actually talks about how wolves hunt and stalk pregnant women. This is an animal living in proximity to humans. Normally, they don’t attack humans. People are not their normal prey. They hunt goats and sheep. Why they have hunted humans in this particular case (Bahraich) has to be studied,” Rangarajan told DTE.
The Raj and the Natural World: The War Against ‘dangerous Beasts’ in Colonial India, Rangarajan’s 1999 paper, has an entire section on wolves in British India. It provides various facets of information about the species that still hold true and may provide clues to those investigating the Bahraich attacks.
In his paper, Rangarajan describes the habitat of Indian wolves (Canis lupus pallipes) in British India.
“This simple fact points to a very significant feature of wolf ecology in the subcontinent: it was ‘extremely common’ in areas with gazelle and blackbuck but ‘very seldom’ seen in forested patches,” he writes.
The historian then gives examples of encounters between wolves and British administrators and army officers to prove his point.
“Major Ray found them in large acacia (babool) plantations that were several hundred acres large. The country was ‘absolutely flat’ with only a few nullahs (dry stream beds), and a few stones here and there, crops down, and ‘not a bush or anything’ to obstruct the view. Waddington speared wolves in flat, open country near the sea shore,” notes Rangarajan.
Interestingly, the paper also mentions wolves in the Indo-Gangetic plains, where Bahraich is.
“The fact that wolves could take shelter in fields is testimony to their adaptability and versatility. Even a large male was about 65-75 cm tall. This would explain its continued survival in the Indo-Gangetic plains well into the twentieth century,” according to Rangarajan.
“The Indian wolf is a major predator of scrub jungle, grasslands, dry Savannah and ravine lands. It had a much more extensive range with possibly bigger numbers at the time of independence. It shares much of its range with pastoralists and dry land cultivators,” Rangarajan told DTE.
He added that the Indian wolf was much smaller in size compared to its North American and European cousins. This meant that this lineage of wolf, one of the oldest in the world and the southernmost, could not usually attack an adult human being. But it could attack and kill children.
This, and the fact that wolves in India (like other parts of their global range) were a threat to pastoralists, meant that the species had to pay a heavy price in British India.
Rangarajan’s paper describes in great detail, how wolves were hunted by the British in India.
The Indian wolf does not have much of a pelt, given that it lives in an arid landscape, unlike its more woolly and furry cousins in the boreal forests of Eurasia and North America. It was also looked upon as a threat to children and livestock.
“Wolves killed more people than tigers in present-day Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s,” Rangarajan told DTE. The regions most affected at the time due to wolf attacks were present-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
In 1876, as many as 721 lives were lost to wolves in the North Western Provinces (later the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and then Uttar Pradesh). In turn, 2,825 wolves were slain for bounties.
“The loss of lives to wolves was also heavy in Bihar. In 1876 all but a dozen of the 185 deaths were from Patna and Bhagalpur Divisions. In turn they accounted for over half of wolves killed,” according to the paper.
Consequently, the British Indian state launched a policy to exterminate it as ‘vermin’.
“The extermination of wolves remained a priority in the NWP and Awadh (later UP) right into the 1920s. The Lieutenant Governor singled out the elimination of the wolf as ‘the single most important part’ of measures for destroying wild animals. Wolves in the NWP accounted for ‘twenty to fifty times’ the human lives lost to other beasts of prey. Their persistent efforts to carry off children were ‘almost incredible,” according to the paper.
In other parts of the subcontinent — north-western, central, and southern India — humans clashed with wolves not over attacks on children but over depredations on livestock, especially sheep and goats.
Bounties on wolves in the North Western Provinces and Bihar were high.
In the former, it was 12 annas for a female wolf cub, compared to 8 for a male. In Jaunpur, present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh, the local commissioner offered 5 rupees for an adult and a rupee for a cub.
“Higher bounties, with larger amounts for females and cubs, were one way to encourage the destruction of the carnivore. In Gorakhpur, fatalities were highest in summer, ‘when people are in the habit of sleeping in the open air.’ The reward for a wolf was therefore fixed at 4 rupees, in contrast to only 3 rupees for the former. In 1883 the Allahabad district paid as much as 8 rupees for a female cub, twice that for an adult male,” Rangarajan notes in the paper.
He observes that the British Indian government was often faced with a dilemma about whether to employ Army soldiers or shikaris from local communities to hunt wolves.
The British employed hunters from marginalised groups like Nats, Kanjers, Musahirs and Pardhis “as they had a deep knowledge of its (wolf) habits and the local terrain”. But this strategy did not always succeed due to the tremendous gaps of knowledge and communication between the British and the natives.
For instance, several of the ‘wolves’ actually killed for rewards by local hunters may have actually been jackals (Canis aureus) as British administrators, not well-acquainted with local fauna, were often not able to tell the difference between a wolf and a jackal.
Rangarajan estimates that over 100,000 wolves were killed for rewards in British India between 1871 and 1916. However, he adds that the figures are themselves suspect. One reason could be that the records for at least 19 of these years are incomplete.
However, the wolf managed to survive this wanton slaughter. And Rangarajan credits this to the species’ “ability to make itself unseen”.
Its smaller size enabled it “to survive in areas with a high degree of human activity, often in low jungle and scrub on the outskirts of villages”.
“These are very intelligent humans and know their human neighbours well,” Rangarajan told DTE.
The wolf’s survival in British India, against all odds “was a tribute to its own capacity to remain an unseen predator,” the paper notes poignantly.