Our Spl Correspondent
New Delhi: A forthcoming film on human-animal conflict on the well-known Discovery Channel tries to depict in proper perspective various dimensions of the raging conflict between encroaching human and animals in India’s Northeast as well as some other parts of the world.
For a change the film titled World’s Deadliest Towns explains human beings are indeed encroaching upon territories of wild animals forcing the latter now to fight back with a vengeance and at the same time how it has become impossible for the people to move out to other safer places to escape the wrath of four-footed animals.
The film has focused on raging man-animal conflict in Northeast India, the Sundarbans and Zambia. As a bulk of problems of wild animals versus people occur in India two episodes are devoted to the country.
World’s Deadliest Towns is a three-part series that focuses on elephant issues in parts of Northeast India; hippos killing entire families in Zambia’s Zambezi River; and Royal Bengal Tigers killing people on a daily basis at the Sundarbans in West Bengal. The film is trying to treat the focal theme from the point of view of both the parties — human and animal — in conflict.
“In India there are over a billion people competing for space. When you see a father with four children you know he should be able to do anything he can to feed his kids. Then you see the elephant and her calf and you believe that she should do anything to feed her little one,” the film set to be beamed in Discovery Channel says.
The film depicts one of the most frightening and tragic tales of man-elephant conflicts happening in the Northeast India where tea plantations have taken over forests in which elephants used to roam around. There it is now common for farmers to chase away the invading gentle giants, forcing the animals to grudgingly run around in circles.
The film mentions one of the chilling stories involving a she elephant which witnessed her calf getting killed during a stampede. She then not only started killing people but eating them too. It is very rare for an herbivore to turn a man-eater but the incident was real.
In fact, during the fortnight-long shooting of the film in the location as many as nine people were killed by elephants in the area.