Hyd hunter ‘preyed’ upon by activists

Nawab Shafath Ali Khan is a professional hunter whose services are used by many state governments to kill man-eating animals like tiger and leopard. One of his most famous expedition included ‘Operation Tiger’ at Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh. For 35 days in 2009, Shafath, on request from the UP government, was in search of a tigress which turned into a man-eater and killed five lives and mauled 35 people. He finally killed the tigeress and received applause from every corner. But the hunter laments as to how his profession is being misinterpreted as random killing of animals by wild-life activists and explains the importance of culling animals to preserve wildlife.

Lata Jain

Somewhere in the rice fields of the Janjehli forest of Thung area of the Himachal plains, 32-year-old Hari Singh’s mutilated body was found in the bushes, a few yards away from his house. He was a victim of a man eating leopard. Hari Singh’s family received a compensation of a lakh rupees but that was not going to dry up their eyes. Hari was not the first victim of that man eating leopard in the village. After several such instances, the Himachal government invited Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, a hunter from Hyderabad to shoot the man eating leopard. His .458 Winchester Magnum rifle did not miss the leopard. One bullet and the leopard was dead. There were celebrations and 500 women tied Rakhi to the Nawab. But wildlife activists were livid. They questioned as to how killing man-eating tigers will help in wildlife conservation?

The newspapers, of late, have been strewn with reports, of how Nawab Shafat Ali Khan has been marauding wildlife and killing animals on a rampage. What Shafath Ali was involved in was culling. Culling is the process of killing animals either to reinforce certain desirable characteristics or to remove certain undesirable characteristics from a group which in the above case was the man-eating leopard.

While India does not allow killing of endangered animals except in extreme cases, culling has been in practice in other countries, including the US and southern Africa, as a strategy to control wildlife population. Nawab Shafat Ali Khan discouraged the sympathy displayed by animal rights activists and for posing as an obstacle to culling programmes, previously initiated by the government. He says that there is a big difference between hunting and poaching. Shafat said that poaching is what is rampant in India which should be discouraged and not hunting.

Shafat says that hunting animals is necessary when animals turn out to be a burden. He cites an example of how killing a tiger in self-defence cannot be termed as committing an offence. Shafat laments as to how the attitude of the government towards conserving wildlife is fundamentally flawed, where we endorse a “not-in-my-backyard” conservation perspective while simultaneously pushing for humans and wildlife to be neighbours without fences. He says that hunting is beneficial to the conservation of wildlife.

The hunter describes how his profession is packed with risk. “Leopards are nocturnal hunters, who take advantage of the darkness. They efficiently make use of all their heightened senses, especially hearing and smell. They're also known to prey on humans, so you imagine the risk to the life of shooters, while culling them”, says Shafat.

He appealed to the government and forest departments to use solar fencing, make an oasis and use GPS system. Shafat says that by using technology and solar fencing, we are demarcating the boundaries of the humans to the wild. He said that is an effective solution which would provide safety to both the species and help in conserving and protecting important products from being robbed like the honey, gum and other rich natural resources.