Above: I saw this beautiful dog sitting behind a highway "dhaba" (restaurant) on the way back from Bori-Satpuda. INDogs often climb on to high places like walls, unlike most other breeds.
Above: Marking territory
Above: I disturbed his siesta
Above and below: Scenes like this gave me an impression of an idyllic life, specially in the case of the child and pup below.
A closer view of this boy's family completely shattered that illusion. The family are very poor, like most forest-dwellers. He and his little sister are mentally challenged, and have no doubt worsened over the years because they've had no medical attention at all. The smallest sister is a baby and very hard of hearing. They are totally neglected by their mother, who probably started having children at a very early age and pays them little attention except to yell at them once in a while. She had eight children but only four have survived. She told us that she had no time to take her children to a doctor, as she had to work in the fields all day.
Below: Sadly, the pup and the chicken seemed to be the only healthy members of this family (and I shouldn't really describe the poor chicken as a family member). This visit left me uncharacteristically depressed.
Below: Furry mix-breed - like the pup above.
Above and below: This INDog and his family live in a Korku village which has just been resettled outside the tiger reserve. They were in the process of shifting at the time of my visit.
Bori-Satpuda Tiger Reserve,
Madhya Pradesh
3 comments:
This post depressed me too.
Its amazing how digs migrate to place even humans dont.
I love the picture of the dog whose sleep you disturbed. The sleeping dog in the background completes the picture.
Hi June,
Dogs don't migrate through tiger/leopard forests. At least, I've never seen dogs wandering in such places unaccompanied by humans.
The presence of mix-breeds in these villages would mean that breeds other than INDogs were actually brought in from outside by villagers. Specially since ownerless dogs on the highways around these forests are very often pure INDogs. For instance all along the highway between Nagpur and the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve I've seen pure INDogs, but in villages inside the reserve there are a lot of mix-breeds.
This has happened a lot in western and central India but in the east (eg in the Sundarbans and Orissa) the remote dog populations are not hybridized - yet.
Re families like this little boy's, there is some kind of silver lining, as all the villages will be resettled out of the forest in the next few years. So they will have easier access to medical care than they do now.
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