A tiger was shot and killed by the joint forces of Kerala and Karnataka
forest officials. It has been reported and evidence found that the tiger has
been endangering the livestock from free grazing and thus there was no other
alternative, but to kill it. So the argument goes as far as the Kerala Forest
Department views are concerned. However, is that all to the story or there is
more?
Undoubtedly, the green activists have come down heavily on the killing
of the tiger that had killed some livestock presumably to feed on it and surely
not for whiling away its time. The pertinent question that arises out of that
shooting is whether the tiger was dangerous to human life or not. This would
give suitable answer to the question as to whether the act of killing the
highly endangered animal in this hasty way. Wasn’t it that the local population
had encroached upon the land meant for the tiger?
There is little doubt that the shooting was done rather hastily and
this can easily be gathered from the opinions aired by none other than the
Karnataka Forest Officers. The circumstantial evidence conforms that the
officers had fired two tranquilizer bullets on the tiger. They presumably have
to wait for at least twenty to thirty minutes for the effect to take place and
yet the crowd of people who had come to watch the scene was all too
enthusiastic about the killing than the waiting. The frightened forest
officials seeing the vehement protests from the people had no other option, but
to shoot the tiger in an untimely manner. This could have been easily avoided
what with arrangement of a safe place in Thrissur zoo has been planned the
moment the tiger was brought captured and live. It could have also created a
large number of daily visitors and would have made quite a pile of money for
the zoo.
Changing the Mindset is
Necessary
There is yet another circumstantial evidence projecting the mindset of
the people of Kerala. Most of the crowd behavior indicates unsystematic
reasoning or logic of the whole event that had taken place in the forest area and
so also for many other events far removed from this. There is a concerted
effort to create a logical base within the larger illogical biasness. For
instance, there is an acute shortage of land and not quite a lot of average people
would have ever thought it from this angle. There is a move for urbanization of
scattered housing rather than pitching in for apartments within segregated
plots. The idea of keeping the land prices high is significant pointer to this
case as the idea of encroaching on the government lands and the forest lands.
Tiger killing is a triumph of the vested interest giving sound justification to
an otherwise easily manageable problem.
The same is the case with Lallur in Thrissur and Lallur like situation
where un-cultivable areas for safe waste disposals have been hijacked by land
mafia and they in turn had provided areas or plots of land to ordinary people
to allow construction of houses. Naturally, the residents who had so
constructed their cheap houses in that cheaply available land are now in arms
against the treatment of wastes there. This gives room for a lot of anomalies
in future governmental programs and administrative policies for the betterment
of the state as a whole.
It is an all too well known fact that Kerala has the highest density of
population per square kilometer and the future of housing developing or rather
affordable housing is quite remote. The future of Kerala is best seen in close
knit colonies or high rise apartment blocks and not in spreading of
urbanization or scattered dwellings. A larger area of forest land has to be
preserved and protected and what is left has to be utilized for agriculture.
But unfortunately the people here have killed the ‘larger tiger of thinking and
reasoning’.
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