THE FEARLESS CATTLE GRAZIERS OF GIR

When I first began studying Asian lions in the late 1960’s in their last wild home, the Gir Forest Sanctuary in India, one of my plans for finding them in the 500 square mile (1200 sq. km) forest was to travel about the network of logging roads periodically stopping to play recordings of lion roars over a loudspeaker and noting the responses I got. I had already proven over several summers that it was possible to follow wolf packs about for months at a time just by howling back and forth with them after dark. Lions are known for roaring a lot, especially at night, and it seemed like a technique that should work with them as well.
The first task was to make recordings of lions roaring that I could use for eliciting responses. One dark moonless night about two weeks into the study I came upon a pair of male lions resting on a forest road deep inside the sanctuary. Every so often they would have a bout of roaring. In the headlights of my open jeep I could see the dust blowing off the road with each downward directed roar, so powerful was the force of their breath. I had just set up my Uher tape recorder and was aiming my hand held parabolic reflector towards them as they began their next roaring session when I heard a clanking noise at some distance behind me. It was coming closer. Annoyingly it was messing up the quality of my recording. “Damn it”, I said to myself. “What is causing such a racket”?
Shortly after the roaring stopped out of the dark behind me appeared two men dressed in white. They were cattle graziers, maldhari as they are called locally, dressed like the maldhari dressed in this photo and walking on foot with no flashlight and accompanied by a camel. Strapped to either side of the camel was a sheet of metal corrugated roofing. With each step the camel made the ends of the two sheets slapped together creating a loud clank.
As they came nearer I called to them, “Sowitch! Sowitch" (Lion! Lion!), which was about the sum total of my Gujarati at the time. I pointed out the two male lions in the headlights lying in the road up ahead. The men stopped and talked among themselves, presumably deciding what to do next.
To my surprise they each picked up a stone, and bringing themselves with camel in tow around to the front of the jeep, they proceeded to walk straight towards the lions. As they drew near one of them heaved his stone at the nearest lion. It whopped the big cat on the side, causing him to leap to his feet and run off into the forest. The other lion followed suit before the second maldhari had had a chance to throw his stone. The two men and camel continued down the road and into the blackness of the night. I stood there dumbfounded by what I had witnessed. The men had treated their lion encounter as if it was no big deal.
Little did I know that their fearless attitude was the norm among the cattle graziers of Gir none of whom carried firearms (it was illegal to do so). Much experience dealing with lion depredations upon their stock while co-existing with them over centuries had taught the maldhari to be brazen. It was a con game. Even when the lions were attempting to feed on a cow or buffalo they had just succeeded in bringing down, the cattle graziers would drive them off with a combination of shouting at them, throwing rocks and behaving aggressively. Sometimes they used a rock sling, called a “gopan”, a la David and Goliath. Whirling it round several times in the air, they would release one end, causing the rock to fly out with such speed that you could hear it sing as it flew through the air. While such a projectile could do real harm if it struck its intended target, all the maldhari I ever saw practicing shots with their gopans had such difficulty trying to control the direction the stone flew, that I found it necessary to stand well back, preferably behind the protective cover of a tree less their missiles should accidentally fly off in my direction.
Success in driving lions away was a con game. Any adult lion could have walked up and with just a single strong blow with one of its massive paws never mind a bite from its even more lethal jaws could easily maim or kill any irate maldhari who was threatening them. But the lions didn’t realize that they had such power against the men dressed in white, and beyond making bluff charges on occasion, would always back off when forced to. Although man-eating by lions did become a problem many years later, accounting for scores of deaths, there was no history of it occurring during the time when I lived there.
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