Wolf attacks have become a daily affair in Bahraich’s Manjhara Taukali village, but the residents don’t want the animals to be killed. They are keen on finding ways to keep them at bay.
Durgawati Devi, 38, from Balirajpurva hamlet, is the latest victim of a wolf attack. She was sleeping in the verandah of her house around 3am on Saturday when the animal pounced on her.
“The wolf sank its teeth into her arms and left a deep gash. On Thursday night, a wolf had attacked our neighbour Vimala Devi, 40, and wounded her right arm,” Durgawati’s husband Lalji Nishad told this newspaper over the phone on Saturday.
He said the wolf had attacked five people in the village within 36 hours.
“The wolves have targeted 40 people since September this year. The forest department has failed to catch them. They are more interested in following the orders of the chief minister, on whose instructions they killed a wolf on September 27, about 6km from our area. We don’t want them to kill the animals. We want them to catch the wolves and send them to zoos or release them into the forest,” Lalji said.
Villager Ranjan Nishad, 65, said spotting grey wolves in the village was nothing new for them. “However, they used to run away at the sight of humans. We are fed up with the attacks, but killing them is not a solution. The solution in the short run is to catch them and, in the long run, to send them back to their habitat,” he said.
The forest department had killed a wolf in Gajadharpur hours after chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s meeting with the family of a wolf-attack victim. Adityanath had approved a shoot-on-sight order and announced in his speech in adjoining Gandhiganj that the menace would end soon.
“But the wolf that was killed was not among those currently active in Manjhara Taukali. It was a she-wolf. I had seen it after it was killed. It looked pregnant,” said Sahaj Ram, a block development council member of the area.
Ram Sajivan, 35, a resident of Manjhara Taukali, said a pack of 5-6 wolves were straying into the villages. “The forest department can bait and cage them easily if they want. But they are laying net traps, which has failed to do the job,” he said.
Although the forest department has not commented on the number of wolves on the prowl, villagers claimed they had spotted four in pairs of two each till last week. However, a third pair strayed into the agricultural fields surrounding Manjhara Taukali last week, they added.
Villager Sushil Kumar, 30, said: “The forest department officers have told us that only male wolves are attacking us because the females are pregnant and mostly inactive, unlike Mahasi, where female wolves had attacked and killed 10 people last year.”
Ram Singh, divisional forest officer, said they had no idea about the number of wolves active in the area. “Jackals also frequent the area, and the villagers may not be able to differentiate between them and the wolves,” he added.
On October 5, Raj Kumar, 30, had killed a jackal in Tediya hamlet.
“My sister Sushila and I were sleeping in the veranda when an animal grabbed my neck. I caught it by its neck and kept squeezing it till it became lifeless. Forest department officers told us that it was a jackal and not a wolf. Be it wolf or jackal, I didn’t want to do it. But I had to protect myself,” Kumar said.
Jitendra Yadav, a former panchayat chief, said beating drums for one or two hours every evening scares away wolves and jackals from villages. “I have done this in some of the 86 clusters of Manjhara Taukali. The residents of each hamlet should do this because killing is not important, saving ourselves is important,” Yadav said.