Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law," by Mary Roach
With a predatory attack, the survival strategy is the opposite. The rare predatory bear attack begins quietly, with focused intent. Counter to common assumption, it’s more often a black bear than a grizzly. (Though with both species, predatory attacks are rare.) The bear may be following at a distance, circling around, disappearing and reappearing. If a bear starts to charge with its ears laid flat, you’re the one who needs to look scary. Open your jacket to make yourself look larger. If you’re in a group, get together and yell, so you look like one big, loud creature. “Try to give the message, ‘I am not going to give up without a fight.’ ” Aaron says. “Stomp your feet, throw rocks.”
The same holds true for an attacking cougar. Take inspiration from the Kansas pioneer N. C. Fancher, who in the spring of 1871 noticed a cougar eyeing him as he stood inspecting a buffalo skeleton. As recounted in Pioneer History of Kansas, Fancher shoved his feet inside the dead buffalo’s horns, banged its femurs over his head while jumping up and down, and “bellowed desperately.” The cougar, and really who wouldn’t, took off.
And if the animal goes ahead and attacks anyway? “Do whatever you can to fight back,” Aaron says. If it’s a bear, go for the face. Aaron points in the direction of his nose, a red chapped thing. “Don’t play dead.” If you play dead at that point, there’s a good chance you shortly won’t be playing.
The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s flipped on, it stays on for a surprisingly long time unless a kill is made.
Deaths, when they happen, tend to occur in the half hour or more it takes for the squad to arrive. Upon discovering elephants raiding their crops, villagers rush out of their homes, yelling, throwing stones, lighting torches and firecrackers.† A village may have freelance “elephant chasers” wielding spikes and carrying out other non–Best Practices. Bulls and dominant matriarchs may charge in defense, and normally placid females and calves may panic and stampede. In the dark of unlit fields and paddies, people stumble and fall and elephants are running blind and, as my mother liked to say, somebody’s going to get hurt.
“The elephant we can guide easily,” says Officer Raj. “To guide the people is the hard part. They are not in the condition to listen.” They’re upset, and that is understandable. Village farmers work hard and have little to show for it. A single Asian elephant may consume three hundred pounds of vegetation in a day. Between the raiding and the trampling, a small herd can quickly torpedo a season’s labor and livelihood. An elephant among the crops is a powerful impetus to unwise action.
Throw in the wobbly judgment and dimmed impulse control of inebriation, and the results can be dire, Naha says. He squats in front of a speaker, untangling a spaghetti heap of wires. “This is what we see. A group of people are drunk. Someone wants to be the hero, so he goes in front of the animal, harasses it, and that animal in self-defense …” Naha, too, avoids the verb kill, with its undertone of intent. “There is an accident.” By his own data, 36 percent of the people killed by elephants in North Bengal between 2006 and 2016 were drunk. Later, I would see this head-line in the Hindustan Times: “Drunken Man Challenges Elephants’ Herd, Trampled to Death in Jharkhand.” (Jharkhand borders West Bengal.) “He tried to fight with them,” a forest ranger told the reporter. “Them” was eighteen elephants.
Dangerously, an elephant also enjoys a snort. In North Bengal, elephants drink what the villagers drink: haaria, a home brew fermented and stored in quantities sufficient to inebriate an elephant. (Because elephants lack the main enzyme that breaks down ethanol, it takes less than you’d think.) According to Officer Raj, two things happen when elephants liquor up. Most just stumble away from the herd and sleep it off. But every herd seems to have an aggressive drunk—the matriarch, often, or a bull in musth. Whatever you do in this life, stay away from an inebriated bull elephant in musth.
Shweta points out that people’s ire is for the government as much as for the leopards. If there were school buses, children wouldn’t have to walk two miles at dusk, when the risk of a leopard attack is greatest. If there were hospitals and ambulances, an attack might not mean a life lost. But there are not. A leopard is an expedient outlet for their anger.
Naha has held awareness camps at many of these villages. He encourages parents to have their children walk home from school in groups. He tries to discourage people from dragging their dead livestock onto the road for the vultures, because the carcasses also attract leopards. Attitudes and behavior change slowly in a small village like this. Twenty years ago, Naha recalls, there were cases of Pauri women being nabbed by leopards as they squatted in the brush to relieve themselves at night. Indoor toilets were eventually built, but people wouldn’t use them at first. “Slowly they are understanding it’s okay to shit indoors.”
Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word came to mean what it means to us now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing. Mighty tracts of wilderness were protected from agricultural and other development to ensure there would always be places and things to hunt and fish. And the ducks were protected from the crows.
Least—or most fleetingly—effective is the stationary predator decoy. The internet abounds with photographs of pigeons roosting on great horned owl replicas and Canada geese relaxing in the shade of fiberglass coyotes. The classic cornfield scarecrow may actually attract birds, because they start to associate it with food. To a flock of migrating blackbirds, it’s the golden arches on the side of the highway, the Bob’s Big Boy sign, a reason to pull off for a large, fattening meal.
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