I must declare my bias. I must also mention that my bias comes from knowing better. Today, Midday, an Indian newspaper carried an article which got front page placement with ‘BEASTS’ written in a huge font size followed by Arunachal’s tiger worshipping tribals ironically killed a tiger on Jan 7th and sold its skin for 1 lakh! It goes on to add- A tiger was murdered using poisoned arrows by the very tribe in Arunachal Pradesh that considers it sacred.
Fuck you Midday, for calling my entire tribe BEASTS. Is it so impossible to write an anti-poaching article without degrading an entire tribe? Midday was so caught up in stereotyping, they forgot to check their facts.
- Not that you, a ‘national media’, is interested in what little tribal people do, but thought I should let you know. OUR TRIBE DOES NOT WORHIP TIGERS
- We don’t have a religion. We are pagan animists who consider the sun and moon [Donyi Polo] our parents. We do not have religious rituals, shrines, idols or places of worship for the sun and moon and especially not for tigers.
- Attributing the actions of a few poachers/ hunters to an entire tribe reeks of usual disgraceful stereotyping of minorities by the dominant group.
- It is NOT poaching unless an animal has been deliberately hunted and killed in a protected reserve for commercial trade. And no, it is not just a question of semantics.
- Some tribes hunt as a way of life, they live close to nature which brings them in contact with animals which they may sometimes have to kill. This is called ‘bringing food to table’- not poaching.
- We live in the Himalayan foot hills. We cultivate paddy for rice, fish in our abundant rivers and hunt for meat. If we meet a tiger in the forest, we kill it, because if we don’t, it will kill us. Duh!
I do not condone poaching and killing of animals. But I support subsistence hunting if that is a way of life and absolutely oppose dominant media playing up to the gallery and stereotyping tribes as beasts.
I doubt if professional poachers use bows and arrows. That the tribesmen used poisoned bows and arrows hints that they were possibly hunting (not poaching) and decided to sell the skin once they had a dead tiger on hand. Even if they were poachers, it still doesn’t justify calling an entire tribe, a tribe of beasts.
P.S: Thank you for your very original headline ‘Crouching tiger, hidden poacher’. It brought up images of the kung fu fighting tribals from y’know the ‘asian’ part of Asia. Arunachal is [still] a part of India.
I see the tigress very angry over a stupid newspaper.
Yes. Years of constant sweeping generalisations made by mainstream media about indigenous tribes does that to some tigers
Sorry June. Thanks for the clarifications though. Not that I had seen that article, but still. Your anger is justified. Is it alright to email your blog link to the author?
Yes please do that, not that they care.
I agree. I am from farm country where hunting is a way of population control and crop preservation. I get irked when people from the city cite us as being hicks, barbarians, blood-thirsty, insensitive, etc. when in fact it is their urban sprawl that forces the animals onto our area and forces the overcrowding of what little forest we have left. Deer, bobcats, etc once had plenty of room in the area to spread out- there was enough foliage for all. But now due to shopping malls, housing developments, super discount bargain marts, golf courses, etc they are crammed into an area that can not sustain their population. So the animals are forced to starve or come into town where they pose a threat to the public (I have hit no less than 4 deer in my car and I hate the thought of hurting anything- it’s quite harrowing to have one jump onto the hood of your car or try to jump through your door window while driving through the countryside). And yet when we set up a hunting season my aunts in the city or cousins in California treat us like we are murderers. That has little to do with tigers, but I do think it is similar in the fact that people who wrote this article probably have no idea what it is like to coexist with nature and the food chain. I especially love it when the Japanese kids cry out because I eat deer and yet then turn around to consume whale and turtle. At least their cries are due to the fact that the deer is cute, instead of having to do with thinking I am a savage.
yes it is similar- uppity smug people considering their way of life the best.
LOL @ not eating Bambi!
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Fucking ignorance is what.
Arunchal’s tribals? how many tribes are there? Do they CARE about have a frikking clue? And after all this crap and name calling, people are surprised/disappointed by separatist movements.
Slightly off the topic, have you seen Gaurav Jani’s One Crazy Ride? Wondering what you thought of it?
I haven’t watched it yet, but I have read that its about- “Gaurav and his friends set out to find a way to the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, situated in North-east India. Gaurav travels because he’s been told that the people are hostile and the land is dangerous but learns over his travels that humanity binds us together”
Oh eff me tender! it is a happily ever after story! But if Gaurav set out to find and make a boomshakalaka hostile people in dangerous territory film, he must be quite disappointed with the sterile footage he got!!
LOL@ Eff me Tender:-)
It was a surprisingly humane documentary without the preconceived notions that you’d expect. I can’t imagine he wrote the lines quoted above. And its mostly about the difficulty of biking through Arunachal:-) Check it out.
The summary I read was written by someone else, not the filmmaker!
Yuck! The Press are animals no matter what country you go to.
They ‘ironically killed’ a tiger? Killed it with irony? Or were the ironical about the killing? Now I’ll wonder all day!
Oops, that should read “were they ironical about the killing”.
That should read- midday killed irony.
Totally agree with Mom Gone Mad abt is it any wonder that there are separatists groups in India. I’m Sikkimese & when i travel overseas, the stares and excessive interrogation i experience at the hands of mainland Indian officers is so freakin annoying. A few months when i returned to India for my summer vacation, i was among the first few
ppl to have finished completing the H1N1 form but when i made my way to the immigration officer, the a’hole interrogated me for like almost 20 minutes(no jokes). He had a good look at my Indian passport and then asked me “Are you Nepali”? WTF? No wonder i hate flying. And this aint the first time it’s happened…it happens everytime i leave or enter the country(India). I’m amazed at the hypocrisy of the Indian govt to claim the Northeastern states as part of India yet treat their northeastern population as second class citizens.
True, true, true. Indians dont think we are Indian, when we are out of India, others dont believe that we are Indian.