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Country Notebook: M. Krishnan: The Vanishing Wolf : The Sunday Statesman : 19 February 2017
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THE VANISHING WOLF

" One of the animals disappearing fast from most parts of India, without anyone bothering to note or regret the fact, is the Wolf. Our Wolf is not specifically different from other Asiatic Wolves -- in fact, the wolf has a wide distribution over the Northern Hemisphere right up to the Pole, and varies so much in size, colour and looks that several geographical races of it are recognised. In our country, Himalayan Wolves are larger than those of Peninsular India, but nowhere do they reach an impressive size, or otherwise specially noteworthy, except for the " Wolf-Boys " reported from time to time.

As I said in this column when the Balarampur Wolf-Boy was in the news, in 1954, I do not believe that a human child can be brought up by a Wolf. Even if a She-Wolf in milk were to abduct and adopt a baby, the long period of dependence on milk and protection of the human infant would result in its quick death, considering the much more concentrated richness of lumpine milk ( it is the milk of Ass that is nearest human milk in composition!) and the fact that after a maximum of six weeks' lactation, the baby would have to chew and ingest lumps of regurgitated flesh and gristle with no help from the foster-mother; after a year, the baby would have to fend for itself.

I wrote, " The only thing we can now say about the Wolf-Boy is that in another 50 years or so it is liable to lose currency, for it seems likely that by then Wolves would have become extinct in peninsular India. But perhaps there will be no real bar to the story".

Well, my forecast is almost fulfilled already!

In places in the North the Wolf still survives, though it had a range all over the plains of India till about 40 years ago. Naturally with the rapid occupation of the open country by humanity the Wolf had to go -- it could not keep the man from the door. The way it went is significant and something worth remembering in our plans for wildlife preservation.

In India the Wolf was never a creature of the forests, in spite of Kipling's stories. It was essentially an animal of the open scrub and thin plains jungles, the kind of country that Blackbuck, Chinkara, the Indian Fox and the now extinct Cheetah and many lesser creatures favour, dead flat in places and bush and grown grass, dotted with wooded hillocks and cut up by ravines in other places. I have seen the Wolf in the flat country around the Tungabhadra dam, where it is no longer to be found.

Wolves attain their finest development in the West and may be as large as a Great Dane -- Ernest Seton Thompson has a record of an American Wolf fully 150 lb in weight. Here they are comparatively small, smaller than an Alsatian, and weighing only some 45 to 50 lb, a hard-bitten, lean animal, a warm grizzle and buff in the plains; the ones I saw, alive and dead, had broad faces and fairly deep long muzzles with a pronounced "stop" and no Roman nose; they were probably the southernmost Wolves in India some 20 years ago.

Wolves do not go about in large ravening packs in India. The pack, usually a family party, is limited to about half-a-dozen members; couples are commoner than packs and of course there are lone Wolves. They subsist on Blackbuck or Chinkara, Hares and other small creatures of the plains including ground birds; unless they take to raiding domestic stock, normally they do not hunt large prey. Occasionally when no other prey is available they may take into man eating; baby-snatching is naturally easier than dealing with adults and undoubtedly Wolves in India have carried away many children.

They are tireless runners, their easy lope eating up the miles effortlessly but I believe they are not capable of any great speed. A friend who chased a couple of Wolves over some very flat country in his car, told me that when pressed they could not do better than 35 mph. This does not, of course, handicap them in their hunting for they succeed in running down their quarry by cunning intelligence and endurance rather than by sheer speed. As anyone's who knows dogs will know, Wolves are highly intelligent, though more governed by instincts than dogs.

It is noteworthy that in all the places where they have died out, they went even sooner than their prey. That is true of the late the lamented Cheetah too and I believe that when the animals of any place become locally extinct by human occupation of their territory or human interference, the predators go before the prey. Since the reintroduction of a predatory animal in numbers sufficient to assure survival of the species into an area already depleted of prey is almost impossible (in India at any rate, where the human factors at the base of all destructive influences are so different from those obtaining elsewhere), obviously this is something where forethought and prevention are possible where there is no cure."

- M. Krishnan

This was published on 13 September 1964 in The Sunday Statesman

#An Illustration (sketch) by Ernest Seton Thompson not reproduced here.