BENGALURU: Work on Karnataka's first rewilding centre in Bhadra Tiger Reserve (BTR) has come to a halt. This is because of the growing opposition from locals and conservationists. The department is looking for places in Bandipur and Nagarahole tiger reserves for the centre. But the presence of many big cats in these reserves makes the task of finding a location for the centre more challenging.
Karnataka is keen on adopting the first rewilding centre model that was created in MP, where a portion of the forest will be used for creating a special enclosure to house rescued tiger cubs. In a peri-forest environment, the cubs will be fed till they are able to fend for themselves, and later will be released.
A team of conservationists along with members of the Wildlife Conservation Action Team wrote to Forest, Environment and Ecology Minister Ramalinga Reddy on October 31, opposing the rewilding centre. They stated that the location of the centre is close to hamlets where forest dwellers reside. They are apprehensive that the forest dwellers will be evicted. It can also increase man-animal conflict, they said.
They stated that the proposal based on the SOPs issued by the National Tiger Conservation Authority is unscientific. Keeping cubs inside a 50-hectare enclosure, where prey animals are mechanically funnelled into, fails to replicate competitive pressures from other apex predators, or the true trial-and-error hunting experience required to survive in the wild. The centre falls under the definition of a zoo within a critical tiger habitat which is not permissible.
Attempting to artificially rear and release genetically compromised individuals actively works against the basic principle of survival of the fittest. They pointed out that restricting a wide-ranging, wide-dispersing apex carnivore to a small enclosure conditions the animal to localised, non-shifting home ranges. When later faced with the vast, competitive land-tenure dynamics of an open ecosystem, these semi-enclosed animals often struggle to navigate resident tiger territories.
