Human-Wildlife Conflict or Human-Wildlife Interactions???

Within the broader framework of ecodevelopment, the importance of the forest lies unparalleled.

The forest lies central within the whole ambit. The forest in its part will lay bare if we do not include the flora and fauna within it. However, if we sweep our eyes across the globe, we find no place where the forest exists in the pristine wonderland that many of imagine it to be. Virgin forests are just a figment of our imagination which takes us back to the Triassic age, when dinosaurs roamed the world and that diminutive mammal, we call man was still hidden somewhere in the cycle of evolution.

Man today and has in the past been an integral part of the ecosystem complex. Prehistoric man is regarded to be as much a part of the forest as his close neighbours, the orangutan.

Surviving and struggling as we have in this brave, new world, relisation dawned after a century and a half of scientific forestry that, yes, man indeed occupies a place in the set up of things god must have foreseen in his grand scheme.

Coming back to the forest, out here realization dawned soon enough that man and his environment are not two distinct bodies but part of the same whole. It has been felt and rightly so- that forest without man is like the tiger without his claws.

Man and animal had a symbiotic relation in the bygone era, so much so that difference between one and the other was not felt much. But with the dawn of modernism came walls- between me and you, rich and poor, the poor and tribal, tribal and the forest, with the forest- the parts which make up the forest. What was left was a deep fissure, or a high wall no one could cross.

The forest face so many divisions with the state being one of the major perpetrators of the process. Scientific forestry divided people and the forest, made them two different entities and as a result the consequences go on till today.

Maybe, it is time to go for a for a study on wildlife-people interaction and not wildlife-human conflicts.

And perhaps, we can use the following hypothesis-
1. The steady decline of wildlife causes enormous stress to poor people who depend upon the adjoining wildlife for a variety of purposes.
2. Poor people in remote areas have limited livelihood options.
3. There is a significant dependence of poor people upon wildlife for nutritional aspects and tourism resources.
4. There is small mammal dependence and dependence upon on NTFP species.
5. There should be a baseline inventory on the small mammals and their role in the forest ecosystem.
6. We should study foraging patterns of small mammals such as Mouse deer and its interdependence with Kadukai.

These few ideas will help us to look at the range of forage, gender issues and suggest a few management strategies that practitioners of wildlife studies can undertake.

These are just ideas that we should not look at human-wildlife conflict as stand-alone issues but as a mix of the complex nature of things that are as they often don't seem to be.