artists depiction of the deity
Drawing by Girish Arjun Punjabi
Waghoba is a large cat deity that is worshipped by many forest
tribes in Central and Western India. I have appended the name
to my research project because to me this issue, one of a large
wild cat living among people, is more a socio-cultural problem
rather than a problem caused only by cats. The issue and its mitigation
have to weave together the needs of the people along with the
biology of the species so that conflict is not aggravated. It
is inevitable that carnivores will share space with humans in
India for no land is bereft of human presence in this country.
Also we support the highest density of livestock populations making
our areas "prey" rich for the diverse carnivores that
have always lived on this land. Conflict is therefore inevitable
but attacks on humans can be avoided and that is the main thrust
of our work. We also believe that only a thorough understanding
of the issue will aid us to help the people and the cats. We also
believe that any mitigation has to involve all the affected groups:
the scientists, managers, media and the public.
Specifically the project aims to find out the density of leopards,
their prey, the losses farmers face due to leopards and their
attitudes towards the species.
We work in a human dominated agricultural landscape in Western
Maharashtra where human densities are close to 200 per sq. km.
Various methods are being used to study their ecology (more details
in a few months…) like camera trapping to estimate population,
scat analysis to obtain individual ID from DNA in scats, prey
from scats, interviews with locals, GPS telemetry and so on…