A civet cat

Hyderabad, Oct. 7: Claws are out at Tirumala’s famous Balaji temple.

Wildlife conservators and the shrine management are locked in a fight over a plan to rear civets.

Few Balaji devotees are aware that for the last 500 years, the idol is bathed (abhishekam) with civet cat oil every Friday “to protect its charm and power”. Temple authorities say the oil has a purifying effect, too.

“Its smell gives an added sanctity to the idol. There is also a belief that it helps ward off the after-effects of the gaze that millions of eyes cast on it daily,” a spokesman said.

The oil is collected from secretions of the civet and mixed with gingely oil, said Subramanya Sharma, a senior priest of the Tirupati-Tirumala Devasthanam (TTD), which manages the temple. “A secretion oozes out of the testicles of the civet cat when it rubs itself against a rock or a pillar. That is mixed with gingely oil and used in abhishekam,” Sharma said.

Tenders were floated to purchase the oil from China, but procurements became difficult after mass killings of civet cats there and in Africa, in the wake of the SARS pandemic.

Facing a supply squeeze, the TTD decided to raise a civet cat farm on its own last year and brought some Asian species of the animal from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

In India, the five-kg animal, with a tail half its size and a flat body, is found mostly in the forests of Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.

The farm has 75 of these cats but, following stringent warnings over rearing the cats on its own, the TTD has now offered to return them to a zoo maintained by the wildlife department.

The TTD was also allowed to collect the cat secretions from the zoo regularly but would have to pay a price. Not willing to accept this, it approached the central government and offered to maintain the zoo with temple funds, said A.P.V.N. Sharma, the body’s executive officer.