Film: Fighting for India's Wildlife (India)

Related Content

Places
Causes

00:00:00: SOUND UP; [MUSIC PLAYS]
00:00:15: CHARLIE: In India, how is the whole protection for animal rights and conservation going?; MANEKA GANDHI: Not well. Not well. We have very few laws. We have a completely inept ministry, that looks after them, with nobody there. In fact, if you go and catch something, they actively discourage you. So, you get no government support, so whatever is done, is done by non-government organizations, on their own. At the moment, India is one of the biggest markets where anybody can come and poach anything. So we supply China, Singapore, with everything, ranging from butterflies to Germany and Japan, to seahorses to Singapore, to tiger skins to Tibet. We have a pool into which everybody is dipping at the moment.; CHARLIE: Someone told me the other day that a lot of these conservation parks that are protecting, you know, the rhino and the tigers, one of the reasons why they don’t mind it being poached is because it’s a lot of rich minerals and they want to develop it.; MANEKA: Yes.
00:01:20: CHARLIE: But the irony to that is, in these parts are also some of the largest tracts of clean, pure water. So if the animals go, the water goes with them.; MANEKA: Oh, absolutely. Large sanctuaries are deliberately killing off their protected animals, so that they say, Oh, now there’re no more tigers here, so fine, let the miners come in. And with that goes the water, absolutely. I don’t protect any animals—they protect me completely. The tiger gives me the water. The butterfly processes my plants. The monkeys make the forest. I can’t think of anything that I do except destroy it all. So, yes, remove the tiger, you remove the whole jungle.
00:02:04: MANEKA: The human mind is so weird, that if something is rare, you want to finish it fastest: Oh, there’re only two pieces of ice cream left. Let’s have it quickly. So the same thing—the rarer the tiger goes, the more people want it. Now we have only enough antelope, Chiru antelope, for 800 shawls. Because you have to kill eight antelope to make one shahtoosh shawl. And now we have a lot of embassies buying them illegally. Where it took a hundred years to reduce the number of Chiru antelope, a 100,000 to 20,000. Now it’s going to take another three years, to finish the last lot.
00:02:47: CHARLIE: Whereas here he’s talking to another being who cannot talk at all.; MANEKA: I think all of them are on their last legs. The peacock, because all foreigners want peacock feathers so they buy them in the billion when they come here as tourists. And peacocks are killed for those feathers. The peacock is our national bird, and yet it’s openly traded, the feathers are openly traded. Leopards, tigers—they’re all done. So which one will be extinct first? God knows. But it’s a race to the finish.
00:03:21: MANEKA: We think that the new generation will be better than us, but they’re not; they’re just repeats of us. And as the world grows, with more and more people, in fact I would say that the quality of life keeps going down. And the quality of mind, also, is diverted to different things. And I don’t think preservation of the environment is one of them, no.; NANDITA: It is so much easier when there is a dog and they are able to talk.; CHARLIE: What are you yourself doing to try to put a halt to this and create awareness?; MANEKA: I have an organization called People for Animals. We work in different ways. One is, we catch poachers. We catch illegal poachers’ shops, which are really a huge big mafia, because they kill all the cows and the calves. Which again, are illegal, since they’re protected by the Constitution. We try and spread awareness. We work with the police, we do a lot of police training, because they are not trained to know the law at all.; CHARLIE: Can you tell me about your rescue center, here in Delhi?
00:04:21: MANEKA: When my husband was alive, we suddenly got a letter out of the blue, from a woman in Australia, called Ruth Cowell, who’d had a dream that she was married to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, you know, who was my husband’s grandfather. And she felt that she should leave all her property to someone in the family. And it turned out she’d left us a house and some land. So when my husband died—I was 23—so this was the money that I had. And so I built this hospital, called The Sanjanali Animal Care Center, under the Ruth Cowell Trust. And it became the first [animal] hospital in India. And it’s still our flagship. But it now looks after the whole city, and the suburbs. We have seven ambulances. They go out 24 hours. About a hundred, a hundred-fifty people call every day and say, Oh, there’s a cow that’s had an accident, or there’s a monkey who’s here and he’s hurt his hand, or there is a horse who’s fallen down, or things like that. So they go and do rescues the whole day. Plus we have of course people who bring in animals. So we have 800 animals at any given time, 800 to a thousand. We have 22 hospitals now. Twenty-two is not good enough. We have 600 districts in this country, and I feel sad that in 20 years I could only achieve twenty-two. I wish I’d had six hundred. But you know, this is done with money we raise ourselves, and in India, getting money for animals is not so easy.
00:05:55: MANEKA: I’ve been a member of Parliament five times. Wherever I go, no matter what the house is, a garden has to be a jungle. So we just turned it into a jungle. This is the tree, it’s a very beautiful tree come and go around this side. Just feel it, it’s so beautiful. You can actually...; CHARLIE: What does this tree symbolize?; MANEKA: It's religion, it’s the base of all our religion. Ficus religiosa. But in Hindi its name is Peepal. And the tree’s always a goddess. But this is the sacred one.
00:06:31: CHARLIE: What’s the best way to describe India as a whole?; MANEKA: It's a country which has its roots in magic. Unfortunately it’s in the process of trying to lose its magic and become as pedestrian as the rest. It's very deeply rooted in magic; things are and they aren’t. And yet we’re giving it all up for our second cars and our holiday homes and our cruises, in the Mediterranean, you know? We have the largest number of people who do actual magic, produce things, predict the future. There is what is known as a deep magic in the land. And once that deep magic goes, it goes. America had it. Lost it all. England had it. Certainly the whole of Asia had it. And when it goes, it goes. It doesn’t come back.
00:07:21: MANEKA: You know, one day we woke up in the morning and there were no more vultures in India. And the vulture was as important to us as the tiger. And now there are no vultures left—there are 18, hanging about in some sanctuary, who are doing their best to die. And there used to be a billion of them. And we just woke up in the morning and there weren’t any left. Tiger is very resilient; he’s taking his time to die. They just make up their minds, they just don’t want to be part of it. They’re really, all of them are magic in any case. Let’s see how long it takes to go.
00:07:53: CHARLIE: There’s a very special connection that I think we all share between Nature , animals and ourselves and often we overlook animals—it breaks my heart. Have you always been an animal lover?; MANEKA: You know, we tend to denigrate people by saying, Oh, she’s just a dog lover. Animal lover. You don’t have to love them all. You just believe in the right of every being, or every species. And it’s your job to see that they survive, as much as they help you survive. You just have to believe that they need to exist, and since you have the ability to look after them, then you do.; END OF FILM

Now Viewing: Fighting for India's Wildlife

Protecting animals in India is no easy task. Conservation and anti-poaching laws are not properly enforced, and land developers and mining companies are poised at the edge of many of the country's last great nature sanctuaries. Though she believes the power to save India's most revered animals is in the hands of the next generation, Maneka Gandhi of People for Animals is doing her best to help preserve India's unique natural heritage.