Harry Potter and India's deathly owls
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Ecstatic teens squealing over the latest Harry Potter sequel The
Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in cinemas have turned villains in endangering
India's owls, adding to conservationists' worries about tigers, Asiatic
elephants, rhinoceros and other threatened species.
Potter, the boy hero of the popular series by Joanne Kathleen (better known as
J K) Rowling, owns Hedwig, a snowy-white (Bubo scandiacus) owl. India's
Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh say parents of Potter-struck children are
buying them as illegal gifts.
Owl-hunting and trading, banned under India's Wildlife Protection Act, has been
in the news since the report "Imperiled Custodians of the Night" was released
in November by the animal
conservation group TRAFFIC-India. The report's author, ornithologist Abrar
Ahmed, began investigating demand created by the movies after a friend asked
him to get a white owl for his son's Harry Potter-themed birthday party.
"Although Hedwig spends much of her time in a bird cage in Harry's room, real
owls do not make good pets because they need to fly and hunt for food," Ahmed
told Reuters.
The 19th century Crawford Market in Mumbai is among the leading owl-trafficking
outlets pushing more of these solitude-loving birds towards extinction. Pet
shop owners sneakily sell local and foreign owl species for about US$100 to
$500 each.
"Since the Harry Potter films, there has been a marked increase in the selling
of owls," said Lieutenent Colonel (Dr) J C Khanna, secretary of the Bombay
Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "Other factors, such the
shrinking of green spaces and people destroying bird nests, are endangering
birds and animals in the city."
Khanna told Asia Times Online that even a huge city like Mumbai, India's
financial capital, is home to hundreds of varieties of birds and animals. "In
green areas, such as our four-acre (1.6 hectare) tree-filled property, you see
many kinds of birds during an early morning walk," he said.
India is home to 30 of the world's 220 owl species. The saucer-eyed birds have
fallen into the "Red List of Threatened Species" that the Switzerland-based
International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)
releases twice a decade.
The widely acknowledged IUCN Red List, which tracks 45,000 species, gives a
majority of owl varieties a "Least Concern" status, but the forest owl (Heteroglaux
blewitti) in central India and Kakapo owl (Strigops habroptila)
in the Pacific islands are among those marked "Critically Endangered".
The Reunion Owl species (Mascarenotus grucheti), Rodrigues Owl (Mascarenotus
murivorus) and Mauritius Owl (Mascarenotus sauzieri) are already
extinct, losing the struggle against hunting and development.
In India, snow leopards, lions and tigers have long been fighting for survival,
despite superstar support for conservation from the likes of India's cricket
captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
As with the tiger, owls have long been killed over superstition, as well as
some hocus-pocus in tune with the Potter series. Owls are seen as a part of the
"dark arts" of black magic and sorcery, and there is a belief that hairs from
the heads of larger owls have the power to hypnotize people. Traditional
practitioners in India also demand owl bones, feathers, claws, organs, blood
and tears for ceremonial rituals, the TRAFFIC report found.
Harry's Potter's billionaire author took a stand on hearing of the effect her
books were having on the wild-owl population. "If it is true that anybody has
been influenced by my books to think that an owl would be happiest shut in a
small cage and kept in a house," Rowling said on her website, "I would like to
say as forcefully as I can: please don't."
It is not surprisingly that Rowling chose an owl as Harry Potter's pet in a
school of magic. For millennia, owl sightings have been seen as various omens,
from advance warnings of war, symbols of wisdom, to portents of destruction and
death. India's "Devil Owls", for instance, are said to inhabit graveyards as
messengers of death.
But it is not all doom and gloom for the species' future, say conservationists.
"One can be optimistic because many groups are doing good work in spreading
conservation awareness," says Satyakumar, a scientist with the Wildlife
Institute of India, based in Dehradun, capital of Uttarakhand state in north
India.
Kumar, a specialist in protecting mountain species like the Himalayan bear,
told Asia Times Online that problems like the Potter owl-mania are best tackled
through orginizations educating children and parents.
India has many institutions and individuals committed to animal welfare. The
125-year old Bombay Natural History Society, for instance, is the largest
non-governmental conservation group in the sub-continent. There is also the
134-year old Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in
mid-town Parel, which houses the Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for
Animals. Considered one of the best of its kind in Asia, it has a cardiac
center, intensive care unit and a blood bank all designed for animals.
As the land of the all-compassionate Buddha, India has strong foundations for
protection of all life forms, and was the first country in the world to have
animal rights and environmental protection as a constitutional responsibility.
"It shall be the fundamental duty of every citizen of India to protect and
improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife,
and to have compassion for all living creatures”, says Article 51-A of the
constitution, 1950.
This rare constitutional status is particularly fitting for owls with their
collective noun being a "parliament of owls".
In 1962, the Indian government established the Animal Welfare Board, the first
of its kind in the world, in accordance with Section Four of the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals Acts, 1960. The government body has the highest-profile
support it is possible to get in India, boasting members such as from President
Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
In recent years, prominent young Indians have also led spirited animal-rights
crusades, such as the prolific newspaper columnist and former environment
minister Maneka Gandhi. The estranged sister-in-law of Congress Party President
Sonia Gandhi, Maneka, 54, is currently chairperson of the New Delhi-based
organization People For Animals.
Another staunchly committed activist and Animal Welfare Board member is Amala
Akkineni, 42, a popular Bollywood heroine. The daughter of a retired Indian
naval officer and an Irish mother, Amala founded the Blue Cross in Hyderabad in
1992. Even as a child, she showed extraordinary compassion for animals in
distress, be it an abandoned kitten, a pet duck cruelly turned into a family
dinner, or an injured street dog.
Dragged from their tree homes to sate the cutesy wants of teeny Harry Potter
fans, India's newly caged owls could do with the same protection.
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