Human being’s hypocrisy has once again come into the open. “When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity,” says the British luminary George Bernard Shaw. In the debates on man-animal conflict, while the animal is portrayed as the villain, clarion calls are given to protect the dwindling species by caring for the upkeep of their reserves, admittedly a haven for the greedy poachers hunting the herbivores for meat as food and the carnivores for making a fast buck offering pelt, ivory, toe nails and other extracts to waiting agents outside the country.
The term forest is a misnomer for the space the speechless species have the right to claim as their natural habitat. Unless the principle of equal share for human beings to live and the rest of all life forms on Planet Earth is not accepted as proper, the logic behind prescribing one-third share for forest globally is suspect. Even granting that formula sourced to God-knows-who as appropriate, the current scenario of one-fifth for forest cover doesn’t see the human beings in good light. Talking with a sense of regret about extinction of flora and fauna in large numbers year after year after being the agents for disaster, the perpetrators must feel ashamed.
