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Where black bucks are for worship, not shooting

Bollywood stars may shoots them, but the villagers of Baguda worship black bucks.

Idols of black bucks occupy the temples in this 32-village tehsil in south Orissa. Here, the rare antelope is a symbol of prosperity.

''Black bucks are devotees of Lord Rama and Lord Krishna. It is a sin to kill them,'' says Dasrathi Nayak of Ramunda village, which has the highest concentration of black bucks in the state.

The belief is so strong that people have even installed stone images of bucks in temples, the priest of the nearby Buddhakhole temple points out.

While environmentalists are concerned over the slow annihilation of the species, villagers here believe that their prosperity is linked with their conservation.

''The per acre yield of crops in Ramunda increased after some bucks came to stay here following a flood in their original habitat in Vetnoi,'' Dasrathi says.

The villagers do not kill the bucks that come out of nearby forests and graze on their corn fields. ''The more they eat, the more is the yield,'' believes Bhuvani Ra.

No wonder the black buck population in the tehsil increased to 551 last year against 336 in 1993, with no poaching recorded during the period.

In fact, when Bhuvani's neighbours killed a buck grazing in their field their crop was mysteriously damaged, she says. The animals do not linger in a particular field for long and move from one to the other. Therefore the loss to any single farmer is minimal, a member of the local youth association points out.

The belief has also led to more organised forms of conservation. The Bhanja Yuba Mancha, which came up in the tehsil a year ago, works for increasing awareness on conservation with assistance from the forest department.

According to Buguda Forest Range Officer G C Sahu, a black buck protection committee has been formed in the area with participation from two members of each family. It has the divisional forest officer as its president. The 15-member executive committee of the body meets every month.

The antelopes, which are mainly seen in the grasslands of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh, have become the target of poachers.

The bucks are also worshipped by the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan, which was where Bollywood star Salman Khan went hunting in October.

UNI

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