Hello, intelligent bipeds, Excalibur July, 2008

[Guest guest]

'Hello, intelligent bipeds. For most of you the perception of a pig is that

of pork on the dining table or, for the kind hearted, the image of Babe in

the famous Hollywood film. But there are others amongst us, who are charming

and wild, comical and endangered. Yes, I am speaking as a representative of

the Pygmy Hog, the smallest and rarest member of the pig family in the

world. Here I narrate the story of my species and our struggle for existence

in a world which you bipeds have remorselessly sought to dominate.'

 

'Discovered in 1847 by the taxonomist B H Hodgson, we were thought to be

a remarkable living mammal. And as soon as we were discovered were we

christened with a scientific name, Sus salvanius. " Pygmy Hogs were found in

a narrow belt of grassland south of Himalayan foothills in Uttar Pradesh,

Nepal, Bihar, North Bengal and Assam, " says Goutam Narayan, head of the

Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme in Basistha in Assam that is breeding these

tiny pigs in captivity.

 

'No sooner than we had made our formal appearance on this planet did

habitat destruction start that made our grasslands too disturbed and

unsuitable for living and by the nineteen sixties we were considered

extinct. However the British conservationist Gerald Durrell, author of the

bestselling book, My Family and Other Animals showed an abiding interest in

our plight and one of his friends discovered a small population of us

miniscule pigs hanging to existence by a thread in pockets of grassland in

Assam.'

 

" When a creature gets so threatened in the wild state that it cannot

exist without human intervention, it is then taken into captivity in an

effort to save it, " remarks Bidyutjyoti Das, veterinarian at the Pygmy Hog

Conservation Programme in Basistha. " The first efforts to breed pygmy hogs

began in the late seventies but the results were dismal. The captive

population died out and the animal seemed precariously perched on the edge

of extinction. "

 

'But conservationists of Gerald Durrell's team in Jersey on the Channel

Islands did not give up on the efforts to save us. After seven years of

lengthy negotiations with the government of India and the Assam Forest

Department, they started a captive breeding centre in Basistha in 1996.'

" Six wild pygmy hogs, two males and four females were captured from their

last surviving population in Manas National Park, " says John Fa, director of

conservation science at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on Jersey,

Channel Islands, Great Britain. " They bred well for the next twelve years

and when their population stood at around eighty animals in captivity, it

was considered to release them back to their rightful home in the grasslands

where they belong. "

 

'I am an attractive little creature, standing around fourteen inches at

the shoulder and roughly the size of a small dog. I have a bullet shaped

nose that helps me to manoeuvre my way through thick vegetation. I was cared

for lovingly in Basistha with the choicest fruits and eggs offered to me for

consumption. But captivity has to be cautiously monitored.

 

'Sixteen of us, belonging to three social groups are now being released in

Sonai Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary in Sonitpur district in Assam. We were

initially transferred to a specially constructed pre-release facility in

Potasali near Nameri National Park. Under what conservationist friends term

as a soft release programme we were kept in large enclosures for five months

and have now been moved to the final release enclosures in Sonai Rupai

Wildlife Sanctuary. " The animals will be released from these enclosures to

the wild within the next two to three weeks and the population of released

Pygmy Hogs will be monitored using direct and indirect methods such as radio

harnessing and analysis of faecal matter, " says Bidyutjyoti Das of the Pygmy

Hog Conservation programme.

 

'We, a tiny species of wild pig, have endured insurgency, human

encroachment and rapacious growth in human population to survive. And now we

are proving to be of major academic interest too. " The Pygmy Hog has

recently been identified as a genetically unique creature and studies by the

Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad have revealed that

the animal is quite distinct from other kinds of pigs, " says P C

Bhattacharjee, a zoology professor at Guwahati University. " The success of

the Pygmy Hog captive breeding and release projects might also highlight the

importance of captive breeding for other rare and endangered animal species

such as the Hoolock Gibbon that is found in the forests of North East

India. "

'Conservationists the world over are watching with bated breath how we

fare in the wild. So what of the future? Only time will tell. But we can

cherish that we will continue to potter on our tiny feet thanks to the milk

of human kindness of Gerald Durrell's team that has worked with missionary

zeal to protect us from vanishing from this planet.'

 

 

Excalibur, July,2008, Quarterly Newsletter of People for Animals, Calcutta