West Bengal. Evening is descending over a large marshy lake that stretches from the edge of a cluster of villages for a few square kilometres to the opposite bank, overgrown in this rainy season with a coarse grass called hogla. This indigenous plant once covered the district, giving it its name. And the thickets it formed was the natural habitat of a wild feline, the ‘fishing cat’, now on the verge of extinction.
Though not known to attack humans, this less celebrated cousin of the redoubtable Royal Bengal Tiger clearly inspired enough awe for locals to refer to it as a ‘tiger’—from the commonest maach baagha (literally, ‘fishing tiger’) to the rarer baaghrol. Yet, over generations, it lost ground—poached, hacked to death, chased out, their habitats encroached upon and destroyed through unchecked, aggressive industrialisation. Since the past decade, this species, of the Prionailurus viverrinus genus, which does not have any predatory enemies in nature, has been designated ‘vulnerable’ by international wildlife conservationists IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature).
The locals, however, are sworn enemies. “I have encountered many, as most villagers from these parts do,” a fisherman declares. “I try to kill them. I have stabbed one to death using the sharp end of my fishing hook.” Another villager speaks of its ‘evilness’. He says, “They roam the earth in the dead of night.” Villagers claim that they have to stay awake to keep vigil against the night prowler.
This dread of the “intruder” has a basis. Fishing cat, which lives on fish—diving into ponds and lakes for a meal—is a menace for fish farmers. “We invest lakhs of rupees in our businesses,” explains a villager. “But they eat up the produce and we incur losses.” One villager who has observed a fishing cat in action explains its modus operandi: “It waits patiently, focused on the hunt and pounces when it is sure.” Their activity escalates during summer, when water levels are shallow and fish surface. In leaner seasons, fishing cats attack villagers’ livestock. “Everything, from ducks to chickens, is dragged away,” cribs a homemaker.
IUCN’s tagging of the fishing cat “vulnerable” in 2008 prompted a group of Calcutta-based conservationists to take up the cause of protecting the species. They included environmental activist Bonani Kakkar, ecologists and lawyers from pioneering groups like H.E.A.L (Human & Environment Alliance League) as well as biologists and zoologists. Conservationist Tiasa Adhya’s The Fishing Cat Project, for instance, was one of the first to try to track the existing population by scouring the ground for pug marks, scraping up and scrutinising scats and installing camera traps.
After being declared the ‘state animal’ of Bengal, fishing cats will be used for tourism. The tag gives protective cover too.
Adhya says, “Our state had some of the highest concentrations of the fishing cat’s natural habitats.” These included the lower Gangetic wetlands of Hooghly and Howrah, as well as those of the Terai region in the north and the mangroves of the Sunderbans in the south. But the damage to the cat population was immense. Swathes of wetlands had been claimed by agriculture, industry and real estate. Adhya says that farming—agricultural and aquacultural—poses a serious threat to wetlands. In Howrah and Hooghly, wetlands have shrunk by over 40 per cent.
