In November last year, after months of deliberation, the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change approved the Maharashtra government’s proposal for leopard population control in the state. Although other states have proposed similar interventions, Maharashtra is the first state in the country to trial birth control in leopards to potentially mitigate increasing human-leopard interactions.
The state forest department will implement the programme according to the proposal presented by the Wildlife Institute of India. While the proposed population control method has been widely reported as “sterilisation”, Bilal Habib, WII scientist, who led a long-term study in Junnar, clarifies that it is, in fact, immunocontraception – “a temporary vaccination which will prevent these animals from breeding for the next two to three years”. Unlike sterilisation, a permanent, one-time procedure, immunocontraceptive vaccines stimulate an animal’s immune system to temporarily prevent it from fertilising offspring.
The chosen site for the pilot programme is Pune’s Junnar forest division, where negative interactions between humans and leopards are resulting in a rising number of human deaths and injuries.
Since 2021, 22 people have died, another 42 have been injured, and 16,593 cattle have been killed from leopard attacks, according to compensation records obtained by Mongabay-India from the Junnar forest division. During the same period, the...
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