Dear residents and friends,
About 11 PM last night, I heard the loud cries of a fawn in distress. The sound is unfortunately all too familiar to us, and it is the second or third time that we have heard it since June this year, when the faculty meeting to resolve the dog/ deer/ human conflict here was conducted. I had not slept yet, and so was able to rush out immediately and locate the source of the sound. It was coming from inside a C-quarters fencing, right across the street from our building, on Delhi Avenue. It was dark, but I could easily make out several dull forms rushing around inside the compound. A few seconds after I arrived, and as I was preparing to enter the compound, about three or four large dogs ran out into the street through a large hole in the fence and escaped before I could even recognise their colour markings in the dark. The fawn, which had been shrieking and flopping around unsteadily all this while slowly became quiet and its mother, who was watching helplessly from outside the fence, moved in through the fence hole to be with it. My husband brought a torch and I could see a stream of blood from the bite wound on the fawn's hind thigh. Many female deer gathered there and moved closer to be with the distressed mother and child. We informed Prof. Susy Verghese, and the Security and Mr. Muruganandam arrived soon afterwards, to keep watch and prevent further attacks. Today morning, I found no security personnel on guard at the scene and called the duty room to enquire about the fawn. The person who answered hadn't heard of the incident and didn't seem very curious about my statement. As I write this early today morning, I can hear the mother doe's cries, and realise that her fawn must have died during the night.
No one who has lived in our campus during the last decade would need a census to tell them that the deer population here has declined significantly over the last five or six years. With great effort, a general meeting was organised by the faculty association about five months ago to brainstorm a resolution of the dog/ deer/ human conflict on campus, followed, a few days later, by a smaller official meeting in which several adequate resolutions were adopted to end the problem. These resolutions taken were shared with all of us through forums like this one. A highlight of the official decision seemed to be that in future, in the event of reports of attacks by dogs on deer or on human beings here, action would be taken to verify them, and identify and relocate the dogs involved.
Since these promising meetings and the promise of definite action, at least eight deer, buck and fawns have been reported killed in mostly confirmed, and sometimes suspected, predation incidents by dogs, but there is no knowledge of an attempt made to apply the guidelines created at the second, official meeting to identify the dogs involved, and no apparent action taken in any form to preempt further deaths. I am sorry to observe that this will surely erode our collective faith in such processes.
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in protecting the rights of the dogs on the campus, by activists both within and outside the campus. Many of the activists were present and expressed passionate opinions at the meeting of the faculty association. One salient feature of their arguments was that there is no evidence yet that dogs kill deer here and that if the dogs are fed well, they will not hunt. Our family has personally witnessed about seven or eight fatal attacks on fawns on our campus over the last five years, which include several attacks by two street dogs in our own care (before we wisened to the situation and had them adopted). We know several residents who have witnessed such attacks firsthand. These testimonials should be sufficient proof that this crucial argument of the animal rights activists is baseless and, in our present crisis, subversive, because it creates a needless confusion about the best path to remedy the problem.
There is a famous saying attributed to Einstein that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. I believe there is irrefutable evidence now (and also an informal majority consensus) that the following factors are most responsible for the marked decline of our deer numbers in recent years:
1) The policy of preventing selective eviction of hunting dogs on campus, and
2) The widespread practice of leaving food leftovers outside, which increases the number of predatory scavengers that our ecosystem can support.
I learn through the newspapers that the evidence submitted by the Forest Department to the NGT recently identified canine predation as the single most contributing factor to the crisis of declining deer populations on campus:
The same was the conclusion of the aggregated deer death statistics from campus over several years, presented at the faculty association meeting in June. Therefore, we can no longer claim to be reasonably divided in our opinion about the right steps to be taken, and the need for urgency in implementing them.
Being a long-time resident, I can confidently assert that no referendum is necessary to know that the vast majority of our residents care very much about the rich ecological heritage of this campus. Indeed, it is a matter of immense pride and a credit to our collective wisdom this far that we have managed to protect that unique heritage until now, a last bastion of comforting wilderness in an increasingly and insufferably congested city. We must now sit up and acknowledge that we are nearly at the brink of losing this natural wealth. Some of us will be more responsible for this outcome than others, but we will all equally be the losers.
I hope that a committee, comprising concerned members of the administration and the most actively interested stakeholders, will be appointed soon to implement the guidelines of the previous meetings. In my view, this committee should be accountable to report their steps taken and the effects of their measures to the public, whose ecological heritage is in peril. Every effort must be made to identify and relocate dogs who pose a threat, and every unhappy incident reported must be analysed conclusively to identify the cause, following which steps should be taken to eliminate (or mitigate) that cause.
With sincere hopes, and warm regards,
Gayathri
PS- I am aware that the groups to whom I have addressed this email do not reach many sections of campus residents with a sincere concern for the problem. If you consider this message worth sharing, then please do reach them to other groups that you may be part of, in order to heighten our perception of the crisis and evoke a greater response.
