Karma Sonam
The present
picture of Ladakh is a very different one from what the scenario was during my
childhood. People used to follow a sustainable way of life which had components
of local culture and practices ingrained in it. We had a traditional mud house
in the lower slopes of our village in Rumtse, near a small stream, which is a
tributary of the Indus. Rumtse lies on the Leh-Manali highway, at a distance of
79 kilometres from Leh. People relied on livestock rearing and agriculture to
make a living. Cash crop like green peas was yet to replace barley. Most of us
had a minimalistic lifestyle like sleeping on the floor inside our mud houses
with gunny sacks spread on the floor to protect ourselves from the cold floor. In
the agro-pastoral society that prevailed, people had few livestock as well
along with the agricultural land, but there were herders who relied only on
livestock rearing for their livelihoods. The livestock was a means of
livelihood and sustenance in the form of dairy products, meat, wool, pashmina
(cashmere) and trade of animals.
Predators
like the wolf and snow leopard share this landscape with the people who live
here and they find these livestock as an easy catch to prey upon causing
economic loss to the herders and posing a threat to their livelihoods. The
people claim that wolves are responsible for more than half of the livestock
predations by carnivores. The other carnivores that are responsible for
livestock depredation in this landscape are snow leopards and eurasian lynx. As
a survival strategy, the community had built shangdongs or wolf traps to trap wolves and eventually dispose them
off. A shangdong is a conical stone
structure, where a live-bait is kept to lure a wolf inside it. As the wolf
jumps inside the shangdong on seeing
the livestock bait, the protruding, upward-slant walls of the wolf trap
prohibit the wolf from getting out. The villagers viewed it as the greed of the
wolf which trapped it. I remember when I was a child; I had been witness to one
such act in our village in Rumtse. It was a big wolf with a blackish coat trapped
inside the shangdong and I was present
with the crowd to witness how it was stoned to an eternal rest.
Since then,
life has changed a lot. Ladakh has grown into a economically stable territory
in India and apart from the traditional livestock rearing and agricultural
dependent livelihood option, people have diversified into tourism, government service,
army, private jobs in schools, non-governmental organizations, business
organizations and entrepreneurship. The lifestyles have shifted from a
traditional one to a resource dependent one and so have the people and their
perspectives. Our family has shifted from the mud house to a concrete one near
the main road in the village, which is the Leh-Manali highway, and I have been
working in issues related to community based-wildlife conservation for quite a
while now. I have come to realize the importance of wildlife such as snow
leopard, wolf, lynx, ibex, bharal, urial, argali and Tibetan gazelle and
learned that most of these are unique and found only in Ladakh and nowhere else
in India.
I started
working in the field of wildlife conservation twenty years ago and have since
realized the importance of conservation. After working with a couple of
organizations, I got an opportunity to work with a conservation organization
based in Mysore. I have a full-time field duty where I interact with the
communities here in Ladakh to raise awareness about wildlife and nature and try
to understand their challenges with wildlife. Over the years, we have been working
on initiatives to reduce negative interactions of humans with wildlife and have
chalked out community driven programs like the livestock insurance scheme for
compensating losses due to depredation, predator-proofing of livestock corrals,
creating grazing free reserves on community owned land to help revive the native
flora, nature education for school children and a few more similar initiatives.
Many of these initiatives were running successfully in Spiti in Himachal
Pradesh which has a similar trans-himalayan landscape as Ladakh and thus the
scientists working on these initiatives thought of introducing them here in
Ladakh.
Despite all the
work, I had always felt the need to address the shangdongs that were present in the landscape. A few years back, researchers
and scientists with whom I have been working, initiated the idea of integrating
traditional religious practices into wildlife conservation by building stupas near these shangdongs. Stupas are
religious structure, which contains sacred relics associated with the Buddhism.
This ideation was done in consultations with religious leaders, local
government administration, villagers including youth groups, women alliance and
herders. As the times have changed and Ladakh is moving towards modernization, most
of the shangdongs in this landscape
are not functional. As the discussions progressed, a few communities showed
interest in this idea and were ready to take up this innovative solution to
tackle human-wildlife conflict.
The first such
construction of a stupa near the shangdong was initiated in the Chushul
village in the Changthang region of Ladakh in 2018. Here four shangdongs were dismantled and a stupa was constructed near one of these shangdongs. The shangdong is dismantled only by removing a few stones from the
structure, which creates an escape route for a trapped animal. In doing this,
the traditional architectural structure is preserved to celebrate the tradition
of the communities along with building a stupa
near it to integrate Buddhist principles of compassion towards all living
beings. The message is to strengthen the traditional link between culture,
livelihoods and conservation. A religious ceremony follows this construction
wherein the stupa is consecrated by the
Rinpoche. The second such initiative was
carried out in Gya-Miru region of Ladakh, in my village Rumtse in 2019. Here,
the community helped in dismantling two shangdongs
for the construction of a stupa near
one of the shangdongs.
The stupa in Rumtse was made on the same shangdong where I had witnessed the loss
of a wolf during my childhood. The guilt which I had throughout the years is
slowly healing as I realize that it is important to make people aware about
wildlife and bring in innovation to deal with human-wildlife conflict. I
realize that working in conservation has given me a chance to interact with a
wide variety of people and thus made me think and take a holistic approach in
whatever I do. I feel blessed to be part of such an initiative and I want to
take the message to other parts of the landscape. Our team has been surveying shandongs and have found over eighty shandongs till now in Ladakh. The
initiative has certainly provided us with a ray of hope that wolves and herders
and thus wildlife and people can co-exist harmoniously together in a shared
landscape.
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