• We may have hunted more wildlife during the lockdowns of 2020, a new survey has found.
  
• Hunting for household consumption increased, while the need for sports and recreation may have played a role as well.
  
• Improving livelihoods and food security during periods of socio-economic upheaval could be crucial to minimise the impact on wildlife.

Palakkad: Wildlife experts feel that we may have hunted more wildlife during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020, according to a survey. Hunting for household consumption increased during this time; sports and recreation were motivators for hunting as well, the online effort found.

These findings suggest that steps to improve livelihood and food security during such periods of socio-economic upheaval could be crucial in minimising the impact on wildlife at such times. But we may also need to look at hunting differently in such contexts, say environmental anthropologists.

The outbreak of COVID-19 across the world in 2020 witnessed governments enforcing strict ‘lockdowns’. India was no different. A series of lockdowns between March and May 2020 meant that people could not step out of their homes for most of this time. Daily-wage labourers were among the most affected.

For instance, data from Lucknow showed that the average number of working days per month for most workers fell from 21 days pre-COVID-19 to nine days a month after the lockdown, Deepanshu Mohan, director of the Centre for New Economics Studies at OP Jindal Global University, and his colleagues wrote in a May 2021 article.

This loss in livelihoods drastically affected incomes. Food security, in turn, took a beating for many vulnerable sections of the society. Almost half of the approximately 5,000 respondents of a survey in April-May 2020 across 12 states reported not having enough money to buy even a week’s basic essentials. Hunger grew during the lockdown.

Some wildlife appeared to be thriving reportedly due to decreased human disturbances. As pollution abated, rivers ran cleaner, claimed others. But media reports in India were also rife with several instances of hunting of wildlife. According to Down to Earth, Tamil Nadu’s forest minister Dindigul C. Srinivasan claimed that the government collected Rs 40.97 lakh as fine for wildlife offences (including trespassing and poaching inside forests) in the first month of the lockdown.

Dharmapuri forest division alone collected Rs 11 lakh, the report said.

Increased hunting

A team of researchers from organisations including the Wildlife Conservation Society-India (WCS-India) conducted an online survey between March and June 2020 to record the perceptions of wildlife experts who were on field during the lockdown. Respondents included ~100 enforcement officials, wildlife researchers and conservation practitioners from across 23 states.

Based on indicators such as direct sightings of hunting, hearing gunshots, finding snares and more, over half of the respondents perceived that hunting increased during the lockdown when compared to before it. The areas where this occurred included reserved forests, village revenue land and protected areas across 43 districts along the Western Ghats, central India, north India (including Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir) and northeast India (such as Arunachal Pradesh).

Hunting for household consumption increased during the lockdown, felt 53% of the respondents. The need for recreation and sport also fuelled this increase in hunting, many said. “This was also corroborated by hunting videos from our media analyses,” the authors of the study noted. One third of the respondents felt that a lack of enforcement led to this increase, as did a disruption of food supplies. However, the results were also contradictory in that some respondents felt that there was no decline in enforcement by agencies such as the state forest departments either.

Lead author of the study Uttara Mendiratta agreed that while this perception of hunting was contradictory, it could have been an artefact of the local or regional differences in enforcement. Increased instances of hunting could have meant that even enforcement agencies at their full strength may not have been able to deal with the sudden spike in hunting during the lockdown, she added.

The current study “used an innovative approach that was able to tackle the logistical constraints” of data collection during the pandemic, and is a “comprehensive reflection of the impact of COVID lockdowns on bushmeat hunting in India” commented researcher Shreya Sethi, who has studied wildlife crime economics and did not participate in the study. “[It] can be extended to include field data like poaching records from sample sites to corroborate findings and perceptions of wildlife experts.”

Talking directly to hunters over telephonic calls, wherever possible, would have also provided a deeper understanding of the issue, noted Ambika Aiyadurai, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar who has studied indigenous hunting practices in the northeast.

Moreover, the finding that there was an increase in recreational hunting during the lockdown should be treated with caution as it could be highly localized and limited to certain individuals, she noted. Indeed, that is a caveat that the authors also acknowledge in their study: “..the coarse scale of our data cannot reflect local nuances and tends towards oversimplification”, they wrote.

Food security concern

The perception survey highlights two important points we fail to acknowledge when it comes to hunting of wildlife, said Mendiratta, programme head of Counter Wildlife Trafficking at WCS-India. One is the possible recreational aspect of hunting, she told The Wire Science. “Another is the lack of food security at a time of social unrest and migration…during festivals that involved meat eating, meat shops were closed. So people who could access wild meat did so.”

There are also many extremely vulnerable sections of society which when faced with different stressors – such as climate or ecological crises, or economic shocks such as not obtaining daily wages – will shift from market-bought resources to natural ones, said Aiyadurai.

“Forest resources then become a very important fallback for such communities,” she said. “Pandemic or not, people will shift to wild resources during such extreme shocks.”

These are communities that are often not “visible” to us, she added. There are multiple levels of invisibility, such as the urban poor, migrants, women, dalit and tribal communities who are seen to be “lower down the hierarchy”.

There is invisibility also in academic spaces, where there is no discussion about these extremely vulnerable and stigmatized communities (such as people who have been labeled as denotified criminal tribes), said Aiyadurai. Perspectives are also very wildlife-centric, and there is no focus on social sciences or human ecology that deals with studying interactions between people and their environment.

Further, vulnerable communities are easy targets, she added. When they hunt wildlife, it is far more ‘visible’ than the negative ecological effects caused by the construction of a dam or a big tourism project.

“Hunting is seen as ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’,” she added.