Kochi: At Manorama Hortus 2025, the audience at Subhash Park on Thursday found themselves listening not just to a senior forest official, but to a 'tiger'. Chief Wildlife Warden and Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Pramod G Krishnan stepped into the role with ease, from the eyes of an ageing big cat to illuminate the growing human-animal conflicts in Kerala.

“I am getting older,” he began, speaking as a tiger. “When age catches up, hunting in the forest becomes harder. I try twenty times just to succeed once. Eventually, it becomes a kind of retirement life for animals like me. Hunger would slowly push me downhill toward human settlements, where cattle grazing near forest edges become easier targets than elusive wild prey,” he said.

Krishnan’s tiger then pointed to the changing forest itself. Climate change, he said, has altered habitats so drastically that good forests are disappearing. Invasive plants spread rapidly, native ecosystems collapse, and the prey base thins out. “What would I do when my kids feel hungry? Again, I would be tempted to step out of the forest,” he said.

Tourism, too, entered the tiger’s tale. With hundreds of vehicles lining up inside forests and cameras clicking incessantly, the animal’s freedom of movement shrinks even further. “When so many cameras focus on us, we get used to it,” Krishnan said in character. “All I can tell another tiger is that the woman in that particular vehicle has chosen the wrong shutter speed to capture us,” he added, drawing laughter, even as he underscored a deeper discomfort.

Through this vivid talk, Krishnan stressed that the forest department alone cannot resolve the crisis. Human-animal conflict, he warned, is the cumulative outcome of ecological degradation, climate pressures, unregulated tourism and shrinking wild spaces. Protecting what remains of Kerala’s forests, and reclaiming what has been lost, is the only sustainable path forward. Conserving what remains and reclaiming what has been lost, he urged, will require the collective will of every stakeholder.

While Krishnan’s tiger offered an evocative lens into the crisis, another panelist, Thomson K George of the Kerala Independent Farmers Association (KIFA), cautioned that the reality on the ground is far harsher than any literary device can capture. Appreciating Krishnan’s perspective, he on the contrary said Kerala’s farmers have been living the consequences of human-animal conflict for decades with little institutional empathy.

“One-third of Kerala’s land is forest with no human presence. The remaining two-thirds is where people live, and much of this has been under conflict for years. It is a tragic situation, yet neither the government nor society gives it the attention it deserves,” he said.

He added that rising losses are driving farmers away from cultivation at a time when food security should be a priority. “We live in a state where even a minister once said we can always import rice from Andhra Pradesh if Kerala runs out of it. Agriculture is becoming a challenge due to man-animal conflict and that contributes directly to inflation,” George said.

George also brought in the reference to the culling of Kangaroo, the national animal of Australia. He said wildlife population management is inevitable. He also urged the government to declare wild boars a vermin by explaining the numerous issues farmers face.

Adding a cultural and literary dimension to the discussion, writer and academic Vinoy Thomas argued that the narrative ecosystem itself often sidelines farmers. In contemporary literature, sympathy tends to flow toward forests and wildlife, while farmers are portrayed as antagonists. There is a common notion that only such books find good readers, he said.

“If a writer empathises with farmers, he is branded anti-nature. Textbooks rarely recognise the struggles of farming communities, instead depicting cultivators as migrants encroaching upon forest land. While paddy cultivation is celebrated as farming, rubber, on which thousands of families depend, is not even acknowledged as agriculture”, he said.

Thomas also offered a poetic yet striking image of the new equation between humans and wildlife. Wild animals have grown so accustomed to farmlands that they now treat them like open food courts. “Like we take our kids out to eat, wild boars descend with their piglets and choose what they want-- from tapioca to yam-- crops farmers have grown through hardship. Animals now know farming, and they know it is the easiest place to find food,” Thomas said.

As the session drew to a close, the panelists converged on one point: Kerala’s human-animal conflict is no longer a small challenge and it is not just a forest department issue. It is a social, ecological and economic challenge that demands collective resolve. From conserving habitats to supporting farmers and rethinking tourism, they stressed that meaningful change will require a shared commitment to rebuilding the delicate balance between humans and the wild.