The bear in the compound

Last week video of a bear chased by a pack of dogs, climbing up a pole and jumping inside a compound, the university campus at Hazratbal, caught everyone’s attention. The video went viral, and with that scare also travelled far and wide. The scene was very scary, any one walking outside could have easily becomes victim of a bear attack. Thankfully there was no damage to human life. The question, however, lingers: what makes wild animals sneak into human habitat? Why, time and again, such things surface up, and panic sets in? This problem is now many years old. Some years back we saw how a little girl was mauled to death, when she was playing in the compound of her house. That was a terribly tragic incident. Any conscious society, and any responsible administration would have meaningfully risen against this and ensured that nothing of the sort happened again.

But we have turned into habitual panic absorbers. For a night or two, fear grips us. For a day or two, the field staff from the concerned departments remain active, for a minute or two some high official expresses concern, for sometime social media and regular media remain abuzz; then everything settles down. Life returns to normal. And then suddenly a bear appears in some locality, and fear returns. For how long it is going to remain the same.

In this latest video focus was on the bear, but we missed that the pack of dogs also represented danger. We need to ask ourselves why our streets and compounds are no longer safe? Why our children can not move outside safely? Why people taking morning walks always carry a stick with them? Why dogs control our streets and roads? Why bears and leopards occasionally visit us? Perhaps the answer is not in any big talk, but in the small acts of ours that have contributed to an imbalance in the whole scheme of things.

We throw wet waste outside, and dogs have a feast every day. Dog population goes up, and there is a reason for some other wild animals to feast on them. We build houses at places that actually belonged to wild animals, and then they reciprocate by walking into our spaces. If we stop disturbing the balance maintained in nature by God, we can put a stop to such wild invasions.