Attacks and deaths in Bahraich: Why and when wolves turn on humans

In mythology and literature

In the Mahabharata, Bhim’s ravenous appetite was established as Vrikodara (vrik is Sanskrit for wolf and udar, stomach) with reference to a voracious wolf. The English language has figures of speech such as “hungry as a wolf”, and “wolfing down (food)”.

Western folklore imagines the werewolf and the Big Bad Wolf but equally, the animals are associated with the Greek god Apollo and the Roman god Mars. A she-wolf raised Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, and in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the Seeonee wolf pack led by the noble Akela is the hero while the tiger Shere Khan is the villain.

A wolf cub outside its den. (Image courtesy: Dharmendra Khandal)

During the Raj, killers & killed

In the second half of the 19th century, wolves killed as many people as tigers did in India, show records kept by officials of the British Raj. Captain B Rogers of the erstwhile Bengal Army recorded that wolves and tigers killed 4,287 and 4,218 people in lower Bengal alone in 1866.

A decade later, Surgeon General Joseph Fayrer recorded that tigers killed 828 people and wolves 1,018, primarily in North India, in 1875.

Surprisingly, British records also show that human fatalities due to wolf attacks were rare in Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the Deccan plateau, even though the species was abundant in these regions and the loss of livestock to wolves was commonplace.

Nevertheless, government-sponsored bounty hunting killed an estimated 1 lakh wolves, mostly in the North-West Provinces and Awadh (later United Provinces), between 1871 and 1916, the records show.

The resilient Indian wolf survived the onslaught — in parts due to their elusive nature and the absence of any commercial interest in their rather plain hide. And yet, the oldest wolf lineage in the world has conceded a lot of ground — not more than an estimated 3,000 survive today in low densities in parts of its erstwhile range in India.

A police barricade at Sisayya village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district on August 31. (Express photo by Manish Sahu)

Wolves that ‘eat people’

All large predators can potentially prey on people, and wolves are no exception. But they do so rarely, and only under exceptional circumstances. Such situations arise almost exclusively when humans compete with predators for natural resources — by converting wild habitats to farmland, cutting forests for timber, or hunting wild herbivores for bush meat, etc.

Experts feel that these factors are likely to be at play behind the current attacks as well. In India, historically, wolf attacks on people have been reported primarily in northern India — in UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Bengal — where widespread poverty probably fuelled and sustained such inter-species competition for natural resources.

There are other triggers such as wild predators being incentivised by the ease of hunting humans after an accidental kill — the classical explanation for an old or injured carnivore turning on humans who can’t outrun it, claw, or bite back.

Some experts have also suggested the possibility of domesticated and subsequently abandoned wolf-dog hybrids becoming “man-eaters” because they, as pets, lose the fear of people. But that would also make such animals approachable and easier to catch, which is often not the experience of those trying to capture wolves following attacks on people.

Lessons from past attacks

In the winter of 1985-86, a pack of four adult wolves killed 17 children in Astha, Madhya Pradesh. While a single wolf was blamed initially, all four — two males and two females — were subsequently killed, and local tribals adopted two cubs.

The killings triggered mass hysteria as many villagers imagined the killer as an incarnation of the devil. Former civil servant Ajay Singh Yadav’s Man Eating Wolves of Astha (2000) documented this episode.

According to researcher K S Rajpurohit’s paper ‘Child Lifting: Wolves in Hazaribagh’ (1999), five wolf packs were blamed for the death of 60 children in the Hazaribagh West, Koderma, and Latehar forest divisions of undivided Bihar between April 1993 and April 1995.

Another 20 children survived wolf attacks that occurred primarily between March and August during those years. The author suggested that the loss of natural prey and rise of wolf-dog hybrids should be studied to take appropriate mitigation measures.

In 1996, researchers Y V Jhala and D K Sharma, both from the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India, studied wolf attacks on 76 children in Pratapgarh, Sultanpur, and Jaunpur in eastern UP. After analysing the time and place of the attacks, animal signs, and feeding patterns, they ruled out the involvement of multiple packs and zeroed in on a single alpha male or his pack.

Jhala and Sharma’s 1997 paper also pointed to the loss of wild prey due to hunting, the presence of too many unescorted children who were more vulnerable to attacks than well-protected livestock, multiple false claims for compensation, and the fanning of mass hysteria to feed the myth of manai (werewolf).

A major spate of attacks was reported from Balrampur district adjoining Bahraich, where 10 children died in wolf attacks during February-August 2003. Not only did all these attacks occur in the northern Indian landscape of Bihar-UP-MP where hunting wild herbivores for cheap meat is a common practice, most killing sprees began in or around March when Indian wolf cubs are weaned from milk and the pack must hunt to feed them meat.

Clinical approach to problem

Every time serial attacks take place, they create conditions for some to settle personal scores, make false claims for compensation, and fan hysteria about animal attacks. Also, once a wild species is targeted for a few attacks in an area, attacks by other wild species in the vicinity are often blamed on it.

DNA testing of saliva samples collected from wounds of victims can conclusively determine the species involved in an attack. Injury patterns (a wolf pack will bite at and feed from multiple points), animal tracks around the attack sites, location of feeding (leopards typically prefer sugarcane fields while wolves like open grounds), survey of local dens for cubs etc., can offer vital information.

Whatever the trigger, an animal habituated to attack people has to be removed, experts say. But instead of multiple trial-and-error operations, proper identification and targeted removal with baits can benefit both the wild species and the potential human victims.

In the long run, such attacks will stop only when the wolf is either exterminated or given its fair share of natural space and prey.