Let Arif’s Sarus crane have a say

The story of the Sarus crane which became ‘attached’ to a farmer who took care of it when it was injured has ended with poor outcomes for all involved in the saga. The farmer has been booked under the Wildlife Protection Act, the bird has been placed in captivity at the Kanpur zoo after a failed attempt to release it in the wild, and the Uttar Pradesh wildlife authorities look foolish, having done no justice to either man or bird.

It had the potential for a heart-warming story though. Amethi farmer Mohammed Arif found the Sarus crane with an injured leg in his field in February last year. He took it home and treated its wound with turmeric and mustard oil paste and supported it with a splint. The bird recovered in a few weeks but never flew away despite being kept in the open. It went where Arif went and ate from his hand. After the story went viral on social media, the wildlife authorities took it away from Arif as the Sarus crane is on the endangered list and is the state bird of UP. They released it in the Samaspur Bird Sanctuary in Rae Bareli but the crane didn’t take to the wild. It was found being hounded by dogs a fortnight later, and was sent into protected captivity in the Kanpur zoo.

Questions are now being posed to the wildlife authorities: Shouldn’t they have left the crane in the care of Arif, after all? How is the bird better off in zoo captivity? To characterise the bond between Arif and the crane as ‘love’ is an anthropomorphic mistake. Cases of young birds, including Sarus cranes, ‘adopting’ human parents are known, if not common. It’s a process called imprinting in which a young bird orientates itself to a parental figure and forms a sense of species identification. In the wild this is necessary for the bird to learn behaviour essential to its survival. It is possible for birds to imprint on humans if it occurs when they are very young. It’s not know how exactly Arif’s Sarus crane imprinted on him, or whether it was already human-imprinted when he found it.

All the same, the wildlife authorities ought to have considered this when they decided to follow the law and took the bird away from Arif. They should have known that human-imprinted birds cannot survive in the wild because their species orientation is human and cannot communicate with other birds of their own species. The world over, conservationists, animal behaviour researchers and wildlife administrations take care to avoid human imprinting and, if it occurs despite that precaution, the bird or animal is never released in the wild. The other question that arises from this episode is: How is captivity in a zoo any improvement over any other form of captivity? If the Sarus crane’s life going to be better in the Kanpur Zoo than at Arif’s home?

Animals in captivity suffer from any number of ailments due to confinement, which makes them prone to stress and results in abnormal behaviour patterns. Many zoos, especially private ones, are poorly managed, and have no means to provide species-specific needs of the animals. No expanded enclosure can make up for the freedom of the wild where animals can engage in the behaviour patterns that define them as a species.

If Arif’s bird has been human-imprinted, and therefore does not possess a Sarus crane’s normal species orientation, then lodging it in a zoo makes less sense than leaving it where it was most comfortable, in Arif’s care.