: Sep 1,'96.
BANBIRPUR, India -- When the man-eating wolf came to this tranquil village
toward dusk on an evening in mid-August, it was every child's worst nightmare
come true.
The wolf pounced while Urmila Devi and three of her eight children were in a
grassy clearing at the edge of the village, using the open ground for a toilet.
The animal, about 100 pounds of coiled sinew and muscle, seized the smallest
child, a 4-year-old boy named Anand Kumar, and carried him by the neck into the
luxuriant stands of corn and elephant grass that stretch to a nearby riverbank.
When a police search party found the boy three days later, half a mile away,
all that remained was his head. From the claw and tooth marks, pathologists
confirmed he had been killed by a wolf -- probably one of a pack that
conservationists believe has been roaming this area, driven to killing small
children by hunger or by something else that has upset the natural instinct of
wolves to avoid humans, like thrill-seeking villagers stealing cubs from a lair.
It has been more than a century since India faced the threat of man-eating
wolves on anything like the scale now terrorizing this region of the state of
Uttar Pradesh. Since the first killing five months ago, 33 children have been
carried off and killed by wolves, according to police figures, and 20 others
have been seriously mauled, along this stretch of the Ganges River basin 350
miles from New Delhi. A hunt by thousands of villagers and police officers has
killed only 10 wolves so far.
With new attacks each week, hysteria is sweeping the area of the killings, a
terrain of lush fields interlaced with rivers and ravines that reaches about 60
miles north to south and about 40 miles across. More than 9 million people live
in the region in some of the harshest poverty found in India.
A frenzy of rumors has put the blame for the killings not on wolves but on
werewolves, the half-man, half-wolf creatures that have stalked their way
through folklore for about as long as human societies have existed.
Other rumors have put the blame for the killings on infiltrators from
Pakistan, who are said to have dressed up as wolves. Pakistan is India's
traditional enemy.
Villagers have turned against strangers, and sometimes against one another,
in lynchings that have killed at least 20 people and prompted the authorities
to arrest 150 others.
"It's the worst wolf menace anywhere in the world in at least 100 years,"
said Ram Lakhan Singh, the animal conservationist chosen to lead an effort
to kill wolves suspected of attacking humans.
The hunt involves thousands of villagers and police officers armed with
bamboo staves and 12-gauge shotguns. But nobody can be sure that any of the
wolves shot so far were part of the pack that Singh and other experts believe
is responsible for the deaths.
Matters are still far from the disaster of 1878, when British officials in
this area recorded 624 human killings by wolves. But fear is pervasive. Men
stay awake all night, keeping vigil with antique rifles and staves. Mothers
keep children from the fields, and infants are kept inside all day.
In the dark interiors of stark brick homes made clammy by the monsoons,
fantastical stories are told, sweeping aside all attempts by officials to
convince villagers that the killers have been wolves.
"It came across the grass on all four paws, like this," said Sita Devi, the
10-year-old sister of the boy killed by a wolf in Banbirpur on Aug. 16, as she
moved forward in a crouch from a cluster of villagers gathered by a well. She
told her story with tears in her eyes, to anxious murmurs from the crowd.
"As it grabbed Anand, it rose onto two legs until it was tall as a man," she
said. "Then it threw him over its shoulder. It was wearing a black coat, and a
helmet and goggles."
The girl's grandfather, Ram Lakhan Panday, who drove a truck in Calcutta for
50 years before retiring to his native village, said: "As long as officials
pressure us to say it was a wolf, we'll say it was a wolf. But we have seen
this thing with our own eyes. It is not a wolf; it is a human being."
Nearly half of India's 930 million people are illiterate, and the figure is
higher in villages like Banbirpur. Many men head off to Bombay, Delhi and
Calcutta in search of menial jobs, but living in slums among others much like
themselves, they learn little to allay the superstitions of village life.
In the case of wolves, these are compounded by fairy tales told to children
-- Indian versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" -- in which wolves, and
werewolves, are represented as among the most cunning and dangerous of
all creatures.
As a saffron sunset settled into night this week, Singh, the animal
conservationist, met with other officials on the veranda of a rain-stained
bungalow at Manjanpur, another village hit by a wolf killing, and pored over
hand-drawn maps. Tracing his finger over dotted lines connecting red triangles,
denoting wolf killings, and blue circles, denoting maulings by the wolves,
Singh showed why he believed that a single wolf pack was responsible for the
attacks.
"There has never been more than one attack on a single day, and the same
village has never been attacked twice," he said. "This cannot be coincidence."
Speaking by the light of a kerosene lamp, Singh said that studies in India,
some going back a century and more, showed that wolves could cover 40-50 miles
in a day. "So we seem to be dealing here with a single pack," he said.
From villagers' accounts, most attacks have occurred between midnight and
4 A.M. Because of the stifling heat and cramped village homes, many women sleep
outside on latticed cots called charpoys, infants beside them, making inviting
targets for the wolves. In other cases, marks on dirt floors have shown how
wolves have crept through doorways and carried off their prey.
Singh is convinced that the most likely cause for the attacks is hunger. For
five years in the 1980s, Singh was director of India's troubled effort to save
its diminishing stock of tigers. That experience showed him how India's
fast-growing population, competing with wild animals for land and resources,
had driven some species, including tigers, to desperation in the struggle to
survive.
In the early 1970s, India expanded its animal sanctuaries to a total of more
than 60,000 square miles, about 5 percent of the country's area, and adopted a
far-reaching wildlife protection statute. Tigers were on the list, as were
wolves. But while the number of tigers continued to plunge, with many poached
to feed the market for tiger parts elsewhere in Asia, wolf populations soared.
Singh, directing the effort here to hunt the wolves, believes the growing
numbers have now outstripped the habitat available to support the wolves, at
least in eastern Uttar Pradesh, causing some of the hungrier animals to become
man-eaters.
At the meeting in Manjanpur, Singh drafted plans for hundreds of square
miles along riverbanks in the area, known to be the favored spot for wolves'
lairs, to be patrolled full time by hunters.
In addition, a bounty of 10,000 rupees, equivalent to about $285, more than
many families earn in a year, will be offered for every dead wolf brought in by
villagers. A century ago, when the British offered a 5-rupee bounty (about
15 cents), similar methods led to the slaying of nearly 2,600 wolves, and
brought an end to the wolf killings in nine months.
Some Indian conservationists worry that a similar campaign this time --
especially if it is repeated elsewhere across India, where isolated incidents
of wolves killing children have occurred -- could lead to wolves becoming
extinct.
Singh has no patience for this view.
"Crime and punishment applies to every living thing, humans and animals," he
said. "The wolves have to learn that they cannot live next to human beings and
misbehave. If they do, they must be killed." Then he pronounced what sounded
like a death sentence for the wolf in the wild.
"Enough care has been taken for these animals," he said. "We simply cannot
have carnivores roaming around densely populated areas anymore. If India is
going to save the wolf, it is going to have to be in sanctuaries."
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Ragupathy Kannan, Ph.D.
Department of Biology
Westark Community College
Fort Smith, Arkansas 72913
U.S.A.
Tel: (501)788-7616
FAX: (501)788-7612
rkannan@systema.westark.edu
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