Chinese gold from leopard scat?

Chinese gold from leopard scat?

Views: 3150 | July 24, 2018

Fieldwork of collecting leopard scat in Akole, Ahmednagar district comes with job hazards of a different kind... A farmer who worked on our project recounts some hilarious stories from the time he participated in a project with leopard biologist Dr. Vidya Athreya

It was the height of summer when we began collecting leopard scats. I thought we would wander around the fields and pick up whatever we found, but Vidya Athreya had different ideas and she was very particular about them. There was no way I could deviate from her strange plans. She marked our routes on a map and gave us each a copy. She found the most circuitous way of going from A to B when there was a nice road that would take you there faster. If I didn’t follow her instructions and took a shortcut, she would get annoyed. It was a disgusting and pointless job, especially under the blazing sun.

Art by Vinod More

On this job, there is one question you don’t want to be asked: “What are you doing?” All the villagers were inquisitive.

Were we itinerant salesmen? Were we surveying land, water, or mobile phone towers?

When I answered truthfully, some were shocked while others smirked. Frequently, I gave ludicrous answers – and that made the otherwise smelly and tedious work more fun. At the end of the hot, tiring day, two other field assistants and I were walking through the hamlet of Bangalwasti with our large rucksacks.

An old man asked, “Where are you coming from?” I replied, “Akole.”

“Why have you come here?”

“We are looking for leopard shit.”

“Leopards live in the forest and not in villages,” was his expert unasked-for opinion just when we had finished collecting a lot of smelly leopard scats from the villages. Everyone in the countryside is a leopard expert.

And then he asked, “What do you do with these scats?”

I told him with a straight face,“We send them to China.”

He was shocked and asked, “why”?

I told him they extract gold from the scats and we continued on our way, smiling, while the man gazed after us, open-mouthed.

Another time we were walking from the village of Sherankhel towards the scrub jungle of Songalwadi. Suddenly, about 10 women, who had been collecting firewood, started yelling at the top of their voices, “Thieves, thieves, help, help, thieves.”

Art by Vinod More

We looked around, but there was no sign of anyone else; we realized we were the suspects. We explained we were not thieves; we were researchers looking for leopard scats. They became more suspicious. Nothing we said convinced them. We headed back to Akole before we got into more trouble.

In rural areas, everyone knows everyone else and a group of strangely dressed people that appeared to be rambling in their village area without a purpose and without a good reason was bound to attract suspicion.

The women we met returned to their village and described the three thieves they had seen in the forest. A group of young men set out on motorbikes to look for these “antisocial characters”. We met these brave young men on our way, but they didn’t think we looked like thieves so we were saved from a thrashing.

The story didn’t end there. The next day, we were traveling through Adhalwadi, a neighbouring village, when a man winnowing rice on the road, interrogated us, “Where are you from? What are you doing here?”

We told him we were looking for leopard scats. Surprisingly, he was satisfied with the answer. He then warned us to take care while wandering in the forest. “Last night, three thieves with rucksacks were seen headed towards Sahakosha hill. The villagers combed the entire area with torch lights, but never found them,” he said. The news of the three thieves seemed to have scared the villagers, and we found the forest we were sampling for scats devoid of people.

Where the leopard walks © www.projectwaghoba.in

Three days later, we visited another neighbouring village. When we headed up a hillock, people got suspicious. It seemed that our appearance matched the description of the thieves at Sherankhel.

A group of 25 villagers gathered and yelled at us. “Where are you from? What are you doing in our forest? Come down the hill immediately.”

“Why don’t you come up here?” I called back. The distance was only 150 metres. They were not ready to come up, and we were not willing to go down. More men gathered and the mob grew restless. Many were armed with clubs, machetes, and axes.

There was no way we could have continued on our way with this armed and agitated mob at our heels. Despite our better judgment, we climbed down and explained we were respectable people on a scientific mission. They let us go.

Later, we heard a rumour that villagers had beaten up three thieves of whom one died and another was in a critical condition!

Had anyone told me the job entailed hauling heavy bags of stinky shit, I would not have undertaken it. In fact, after a month of walking around in the hot sun, I had enough.

I told my boss, “I don’t want to work on this project anymore.”

He said, “Fine. Before you quit, find someone else who is honest and dependable to work on the project.” I couldn’t find anyone else who might satisfy my boss so I had to continue. But once I committed myself to the project, I thoroughly started enjoying the work. I was camera trapping to get the leopard density in my village lands and I even was part of the collaring work. At the end of it, I knew where every leopard of every village was and we had nice names for them. More about that later…

The author, a local farmer was a temporary forest watcher with the Forest Department and assisted in the leopard research project. The write-up from Waghoba Tales written by Ashok Ghule, Vidya Athreya, John Linnell and Morten Odden was published in the NINA Special Report.

Written by Ashok Ghule

Photo credits: Rujan Sarkar (Cover)

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