Monday Musings: ‘Love song’ of whales vs wails of humans
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By Amitabh Srivastava , Copy Edited By Adam Rizvi, The India Observer, TIO: Last week I was reading an interesting piece in the New York Times about researches by scientists showing how the noises made by the whales conveyed more meaning than just being a normal sound.
Michael Noad, an associate professor in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia, basically links their songs to the mating instinct much like other animals.
The elephants for instance, have a huge fight to decide who deserves the female and the winner takes the prize. Birds showoff their unusual colours and dancing prowess to attract the female of their species in full view.
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But as the article mentions the big mystery about whales is as to how and why whales pass song fragments across hundreds of miles.
And then he gets more specific.
“The thing that always gets me out of bed in the morning is the function of the song…I find humpback song fascinating from the point of view of how it’s evolved.” The leading hypothesis is that male humpbacks — only the males sing — are trying to attract females. But they may also switch tunes when another male is nearby, apparently to assess a rival’s size and fitness.
So far so good.
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But I could not read further.
Agreed that this research is not new and there are studies across many universities to understand this phenomenon but belonging to a country where 80 crore people are getting free rations ‘officially’ (because the government cannot give them jobs) to me it sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
Are we so engrossed with our own fantasies and PhDs that we can even think of dealing with the love songs of the birds and whales while millions of migrants are being pushed out of America by a ‘nationalist’ Donald Trump as described by the Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.
There is a so-called truce between Israel and the Hamas after one year of killings but this is so fragile that no one knows what reaction a small action could trigger.
Similarly Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a war where Ukraine is on the losing side not because of lack of guts or conviction but because Russia has a huge population which it can allow to die for a cause which the government decides is important.
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But this write-up is just not about wars.
It’s about my personal point of view about man animal conflict. We are spending crores with the aim of saving endangered species like the tiger and elephants but at the cost of what- the original forest dwellers.
In the Indian state of Uttarakhand, for instance, a bitter fight for survival has been going on in the Rajaji Forest reserve whose original dwellers the Van Gujjars are constantly on the radar of the forest officials. This tribe which is totally vegetarian, is accused of poaching of animals as the reason to turn them out of their natural dwellings.
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The late Padamshree Avadhash Kaushal set up the NGO Rural Litigation Entitlement Kendra (RLEK) in Dehradun to fight for their rights and also set up schools to provide an alternative education system to suit their requirements. But despite his efforts this tribe is constantly on the run because for the Government wild life is more important than human life.
Top bureaucrats and politicians of the country compete with each other to spent their year end in these forest reserves getting huge revenue and promotions for the government officers.
When some elephants died on the railway tracks the initial reaction of the new state of Uttarakhand, formed in the year 2000, was to stop or slow down the running of fast trains at night instead of setting barricades to prevent elephants coming on the tracks.
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Villagers invited journalists like me to their villages to show the damage to their crops caused by rampaging elephants who had a sweet tooth for sugarcane.
That conflict persists after 25 years because it’s the wild life that attracts tourism not the village life where the farmers have to face the vagaries of nature-short rainfall or floods and landslides caused by cloud bursts. Several villages have turned ‘ghost villages’ in this hill state known as Devboomi ( abode of Gods).
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Unfortunately there is no Noah’s Ark in real life where both animals and human beings can coexist. One of the species has to be put in a cage to be safe and going by the global trend, it would appear that it’s the human species that will be put in the cage leaving the world stage for the whales, Tigers, elephants and the other ‘animal’ varieties on two legs.
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Curated and Compiled by Humra Kidwai
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