- In the Kanha-Pench corridor that connects tiger reserves, herders play a vital role in mediating between the villages and the forest department, especially when tigers attack cattle.
- However, many herders are quitting the occupation due to low wages, loss of pastures and the risk of being attacked by a tiger.
- When herders and their role are not acknowledged, we lose the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, their understanding of the animals, and an ethic that has helped humans coexist with tigers.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author. The findings have not been independently verified by Mongabay-India.
Open forests, interspersed with farmlands and village commons, connect the tiger reserves of Kanha and Pench in the state of Madhya Pradesh. This is the Kanha-Pench Corridor, spread across about 5,900 square kilometres, roughly three times the size of Kanha National Park. The corridor offers both refuge and mobility to wildlife. It is also densely populated, with over 400 villages located across the region. Though tiger numbers have favourably increased to 97 in this corridor, coexistence has become a renewed challenge. According to a news report published last August, more than 14,000 cattle were killed by tigers and leopards across the state in 2024–2025.
In such situations, it is easy to overlook the role played by herders. They possess specialised knowledge that helps people coexist with tigers. They serve to locate livestock killed by predators and navigate government compensation systems. Cattle deaths can easily escalate tensions between forest-dwelling cattle holders and the forest department, the main agency dispensing the compensation. Herders don’t just address human-wildlife conflict, they mediate such difficult relations in the best interests of coexistence.
One would most likely presume that in such times of peak conflict, the herder should be more indispensable than ever. Instead, herders are quitting their occupation due to economic, ecological, and social pressures. As herding and its associated knowledge disappears, it may undermine forms of coexistence that conservation programmes rarely account for.
Cattle signs and compensation
To understand what happens to tiger conservation when the practice of herding is disappearing, it is important to begin with the everyday travails of herders. Bablu Yadav, a burly herder with a thick moustache, is called the bravest man in Devjhiri, a village in the Seoni district of Madhya Pradesh. His task has grown more difficult over time. “I learned much from my parents, but I have seen more tigers than my parents and grandparents together,” he shared.
Ordinarily, Yadav is forewarned of the presence of a predator by the ‘alarm calls’ of drongos, langurs and peacocks. But this is only part of the story. Cattle themselves serve as a radar system in the forests. According to Yadav, a tiger’s presence could be detected from how adult bovines shuffle around their young. Also, from how they mooed in a particular way, or raised their heads with pricked ears and dilated eyes. “Oftentimes it is not us who save cattle, but cattle that save us,” he remarked.
This mutual project of safety stretches to include dimensions of economic security. In Borghundi, a village in the neighbouring Balaghat district, people spoke about how the number of tigers and related cattle deaths had increased in the forests adjacent to the village.
“But we have Dasharam Thakre. He is the village detective,” village individuals differently claimed. Thakre explained that predatory attacks were not always the boisterous events we imagine. “A leopard can sometimes pull a cow or calf at the back of the herd, without you knowing about it,” Thakre said. “Sometimes, we realise only after we have returned to the village.” This often puts the cattle-owning household in a spot. To access the promised compensation, the household must provide proof of predation to the forest authorities. The latter needs to physically verify the carcass. Given the value of cattle for subsistence livelihoods, a delicate moment is reached.
This is when people rely on Thakre, who explained that he takes the same route as the previous day with his herd, though it makes poor grazing sense. “When the cattle come close to the spot where one of their own has been killed the previous day, they become agitated,” Thakre shared. Oftentimes, herders refer to this as ‘maatam,’ or a form of non-human mourning. With this, the search for signs shifts from the cattle to bloodstains and drag marks on the forest floor. Slowly but surely, the buzzing sound of bottle green flies around a possible carcass, and the drift of stench through the trees, bring Thakre to the dead cattle.
Compensation has emerged as one of the most important conservation strategies in the country, particularly for promoting coexistence with large carnivores. Yet we overlook how it may depend on the unpaid labour of herders. The Madhya Pradesh Forest Department distributed ₹13.18 crores (₹131 million) in 2024-2025. Village residents in the corridor reported payouts ranging from ₹7,000 to ₹24,000, depending on the type of cattle lost. In several cases, a herder had made this possible.
Reading the forest
Coexistence is often discussed as a human-wildlife issue. But within the Kanha-Pench Corridor, it is also a human-human issue. In the village of Jam, also in Seoni district, a village elder shared how the herder reduced quarrels with the forest department. The herder communicated expectations and rules from both parties. When tempers rose, he served as a useful buffer.
Such concerns are coded in the herders’ everyday work. Recently, a tigress with cubs had brought down two cows in quick succession. Despite this, herder Deviprasad Chauhan from Jam, still spoke passionately about the presence and movement of tigers in the forests surrounding Jam. On a walk, Chauhan pointed to the presence of a closed coupe on our right. “At all costs, I must avoid the closed coupes,” Chauhan remarked. Closed coupes or compartments are specified territories that are delineated for fresh teak plantations or lopping.
Straying into them could invite fines and penalties. The forest department fears that cattle might destroy saplings. But Chauhan’s real concerns rested elsewhere. A cattle getting killed in a closed coupe by a circulating tiger could also jeopardise compensation claims.
Interestingly, Chauhan’s concern was not that village residents would suddenly turn against tigers. They were more subtle. In fact, no cases of retaliatory killings of tigers by herders or cattle owners came to my notice in the 75 villages that were surveyed for this project on understanding compensation mechanisms. What worried Chauhan was an atmosphere of mistrust between the janta (people) and the shasan (administration). When this happened, he said, “People begin to blame tigers.” For Chauhan, leaving such sentiments to simmer could have long-term effects.
The vanishing profession
At the end of my fieldwork, only 18 out of the 75 surveyed villages proved to have a dedicated herder. Barely a decade ago, almost every village had two to three herding families.
There are several reasons for this decline. For one, sourcing fodder has become progressively difficult. “My children are not going to do this work,” Chauhan shared. “When I was young, my father and I used to walk for less than 15 minutes to find fodder — now, even if you walk the whole day, you might not find sufficient fodder.” Herders attributed the loss of pastures to erratic rainfall, expanding farmlands, growing towns and, above all, spreading teak plantations marked by the proliferation of closed coupes.
As herders venture deeper into the forests in search of fodder, the risk of encountering predators also increases. One woman reported that these days she just waits at home and worries about her husband’s safety all day because there are many tigers. “I keep asking him to find a different job,” she said.
Then, there are issues with wages. Monthly grazing rates range from ₹70 per calf to ₹200 per adult buffalo or ox. This way, most of them earn only ₹5,000 to ₹7,000 per month for physically demanding, risky work. Attempts to raise wages are not always welcomed. Herders make for a scattered and fragmented presence. They belong to lower-caste and tribal communities and have little basis for collective bargaining. When wages stagnate, they simply leave.
This frustration over low wages becomes easy to understand once we take stock of the additional tasks they perform. Where and when the forest department and/or conservation organisations attempt to camera-trap the predator at the site of a cattle kill, herders serve as important guides. Once the forest department takes cognisance of the case, herders help the department burn the cattle to prevent foul play, such as poisoning. Herders make the necessary arrangements for this. “An ox can take a whole day to burn, we stay put in the forests,” one herder shared.
What happens when herders leave
When herders quit, those most affected are people from shared margins. Poorer households are disproportionately affected because they are more critically dependent upon the cattle for milk, manure and animal traction. This was voiced most prominently by a group of Dalit peasants in the village of Ugdiwada, also in the Seoni district.
With fewer herders, women’s workload has also increased. Grazing cattle has joined an already long list of responsibilities. I heard of cases when women had returned home to check on a newborn or an elder, but by the time they returned to take care of the cattle, one of them had been killed by a tiger.
In some villages, rotational grazing systems have sprung to replace dedicated herders. Families take turns grazing the village herd. Yet such arrangements do not allow for intergenerational transfer of knowledge. These grazers didn’t know about reading cattle signs to detect predators. In many villages where herders had left, finding dead cattle had become that much more difficult. In almost all such villages, residents reported failed compensation claims because the dead cattle could not be found in time.
The implications of vanishing herders extend beyond the immediate. Several persisting herders had told me that the death of cattle at the hands of a wild tiger was ultimately the will of the forest deity. Such deaths were described as ‘vardani’ by herders, implying that they enjoyed divine sanction. The absence of such beliefs among lay agriculturalists, doubling up as grazers, speaks of a vacuum that our scientific discussions on coexistence alone cannot fill.
The success of tiger conservation is often measured by compensation figures and tiger numbers. Yet, herders prove that coexistence also depends on other forms of unpaid labour. Herders avoid conflict, locate dead cattle, mediate state-society relations, facilitate compensation, and perform tasks dismissed as miscellaneous. When they leave, we not only lose a set of skills but also an ethic that has helped humans coexist with tigers. The disappearance of herders is leaving a void that no census seems to count.
Banner image: Dasharam Thakre, a grazer from Borghundi village in Balaghat district, Madhya Pradesh. Thakre plays an important role in locating dead cattle and facilitating relief. Image by Ravin Mahle.
The author is an independent researcher based out of Assam. This commentary draws on research undertaken as part of a WWF-India-supported study on compensation mechanisms for cattle killed by predators. The research findings are yet to be formally published.
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