He Left Coporate Life to Save India's Most Hated Animal. Rajesh Puttaswamaiah. Moving Forests EP-25

But others are not allowed.

They don't have access to the cave.

Only the community has access to the cave.

So they make

something out of it.

So they use it in a different way.

Some of them, they just, what do you call, smoke it along the fire and smoke.

Some they boil it with rice and eat it with rice.

And some of them just dry, like tandoori, they eat it.

So it's a kind of delicacy.

They store it for a couple of days depending on how much harvest they get.

Some of them lasted for a couple of months and sometimes if the

harvest is low, they just probably consume it immediately.

So there are many things, many questions I have from this.

First is, humans have always been dependent on wildlife i mean we've been civilized for how many years maybe max three four hundred years five hundred years and before that we were all dependent on going and killing and eating from the wild or maybe you know plucking and whatever like we were entirely dependent on on nature if a species is least concerned and this is just i'm not advocating for it There are many species like this that people harvest and eat, like fish, for example, right? Fish is also wildlife.

And some others, I'm not going to name them because some people are not like, they may not even know that it is least concern.

So what's your view on that? If it is least concern and if they are having it, how is it? Do you think that only...

the numbers getting affected in this area will affect the species at large? Or what change in ecosystem will happen if it happens there? What is the impact that it can have on that population?

I think very valid question.

In fact, before going to Nagaland, even my perception about conservation was like what many other urban guys think about, right? Like everything should stop and they should not be hunting, hunting should be completely banned.

But you look at culture in the Northeast, especially Nagaland and Arunachal and all, consumption of bushmeat is very, very common.

But what I could sense there was, for example, even kids, the three-year-old kid, the favorite pastime for them is, after coming back from school, is to just hunt birds all around.

The hunting has been rampant there, but I felt like for that kind of landscape, the population density should have been much higher than what I witnessed.

So hunting has been there for a long time, but somehow the wildlife is also surviving, but not to the extent that it should have been.

So I'm not saying hunting should be completely stopped.