Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M. Krishnan : PEACE AND GOODWILL IN NATURE : The Sunday Statesman : 21 June 2015
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"TRUSTWORTHY witnesses have testified, independently of one another, to a strange jungle phenomenon - a killer walking past a group of its natural prey, which continued to graze unconcernedly, ignoring the disclosed proximity of the usually dreaded enemy. Big game hunters have seen a lion strolling past, even strolling through, a herd of zebras or antelopes, which did not even bother to raise their heads from the feeding, and in India the similar occasional indifference of deer to a tiger has been recorded. Those who saw this in credible sight rightly concluded that somehow the prey knew that their enemy was not hunting just then, and was, therefore, safe - though these hidden hunters were armed, they were too deeply touched with wonder to use the opportunity to add another head to their trophy room. I have never had the good fortune to witness this phenomenon myself, and my reconstruction of it in the illustration* here is purely the darkroom manipulations.

I may point out to naturalist readers that this extraordinary behaviour of predator and prey is something very different from the inhibition induced by the adoption of an attitude of suppliant vulnerability in interest specific encounters. Here, there does seem to be a definite perception by the prey of the predator's lack of aggressive intent - their normal reaction to the sight and even smell of the killer to panic and bolt.

A rather motivated truce between predator and prey, the weak and the strong, has also been observed among birds. Watchers of the crag-top nest of that tiger of the air, the Peregrine Falcon, have said that though many Rock Pigeons were nesting in the immediate vicinity, the pair of Peregrines never killed them, but sought their prey (usually Pigeons) much further afield.

Many nesting birds have decided antipathy to aggression in their territory. While we should clearly realise that such behaviour is instinctive and unreasoned, it is nevertheless a fact that it does serve as a check on nest-raiders (like Crows and Tree-Pies), and that by nesting in the same tree or cliff as powerful birds, weak birds do gain effective protection. It is well known that Orioles and comparatively defenceless birds frequently nest close by the Drongos, which are highly intolerant of trespassers.

Common danger also serves to promote a truce, for the time being between animals and their natural enemies. In times of extreme drought, a carnivora do not seem to kill at or near the only available source of water, and during forest fires, floods and landslides the instinct of self-preservation of the predators is dominant over the desire to kill. Even in beats, oddly associated animals have come out together.

From time immemorial, such occasional truces between born enemies have impressed men profoundly. In every human civilisation, there have always been tales, about friendships between animals that are antagonistic or unrelated. No doubt these tales reflect man's deeply felt desire for peace and goodwill, and its frustration in his own acquisitive life. However, the fact remains, in spite of anthropomorphic tales and folklore, that there are many such ties, and even friendships, in nature. As Konard Lorenz has pointed out, our understanding of animal ways, particularly of instinctive behaviour and the "releaser" and "imprinting" phenomena, does not in any way lessen the wonder of such associations.

Naturally, it is among animals of the same kind that we usually find close associations of the type that can be called friendship - and by this I mean a more selective and individualised relationship than gregarious ties, or the bond of mother love (though there are few things on earth more wonderful and touching in its strength and sensitiveness than mother love). Among the higher animals, we do occasionally come across authentic friendships - even in finding a mate they are, at times, much more selective than we think they are.

Most of the higher animals feel the the need of companionship as strongly as we do, and when they are deprived of the company of their kind, in an artificial environment such as zoo, they often enter into odd but powerful associations with strange mates, very different from themselves. Some of these associations have been explained on the basis of attachments formed during infancy, but others are less easily and certainly explained - for example, the desire of an airborne Elephant for the company of a Hen, and the love of a captive Warthog for the Monkeys with which it has been caged. Nor are all such odd associations induced by artificial circumstances. In Mudumalai Sanctuary of Madras, I saw repeatedly, at widely separated intervals, a Chital hind running with a mother Sambar and its fawn - Chital are commonest animals in those jungles, and this Chital could have had no lack of opportunity to rejoin its own kind. Other such associations, some explicable on the basis of mutual or unilateral benefit, others with no obvious motive, have been recorded.

One of the the strongest and most remarkable of such associations, to my mind, is the bond that commonly develops between a She-Buffalo in a mixed village herd and the rest of the herd - including the herd-boy!.....the She-buffaloes I have in mind, though theoretically domesticated, were animals with a powerful sense of independence, a pretty wild on occasion. I do not know what sublimated material and herd instincts lay behind those associations between buffalo cows and herd boys.

I remember one such association. The buffalo concerned was large and old, a great, cantankerous beast freely given to the use of its formidable horns; the herd boy was an urchin of 10. He beat its ponderous charge unmercifully with a stick when it failed to obey him, and frequently saved his legs by riding on its broad back. One day this miserable little boy did something very wrong, which called for immediate and stern measures,in the opinion of his elders. And his father (who owned that buffalo) and his uncles (who insisted on prompt reprisal) could do nothing to him because he he had fled to the sanctuary of the cattle-shed in the backyard and was now crouched between the short, columnar legs of his friends. Early in the proceedings the buffalo snapped its tether and thereafter it would permit no one to approach within 20 yards of the refugee. Finally, it was only by abjectly promising (in the presence of third-party witnesses, of whom I was one) to forget the entire incident and forgive everything, that the boy could be induced to soothe the roused feelings of his massive protector, tie it up again in the cattle-shed and re-enter his home."

- M. Krishnan

This was first published on 20 December 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

*The photograph has not been reproduced here.