Minister in Madhya Pradesh wants Tiger to be allowed as pets

The charitable explanation is that Madhya Pradesh’s minister for animal husbandry fancies herself and other likeminded Indians as latter-day Joy Adamson, inspired by the book and movie Born Free. Never mind that Elsa the lioness died of a kind of malaria and the fate of her cubs was never known. Or is Kusum Mehdele simply looking for unusual ways to increase her ministerial fief ? After all, her department must be bored with just thinking up new breeding and welfare schemes for bovines and poultry: the focal points of that state’s initiatives in animal husbandry so far. And a corollary of her suggestion to allow people to keep lions and tigers as pets could be a scheme for captive tiger breeding — the state apparently has a little over 250 tigers in its five sanctuaries at present — like China’s giant pandas. She might even be inspired eventually to suggest commercial (re)production of big cats, as she has also lamented the slow rise in tiger numbers under India’s current conservation programmes.

The minister should have boned up on the captivity conservation debate regarding the giant panda before proposing her pet project, as China’s move has not resolved the issue of the animals’ depleting habitat. Hopefully, she was not thinking of tigers and lions in the context of her other portfolio: food processing.