Made-up monsters: How media is fueling human-wildlife conflicts in Bangladesh

Earlier this February, three tigers in the Sundarbans made headlines. They goofed around a freshwater pond dug near a Forest Department outpost amid the euryhaline mangrove. Strolling, napping, drinking and playing, the two cubs and mother tiger spent a few good hours there. It seemed good news for wildlife in Bangladesh, which is usually extremely shy of humans. 

However, the joy evaporated as soon as I read newspapers, watched bulletins and scrolled through Facebook. Tigers were branded as "terror" who "overran the forest office (as if they were landgrabbers!)", and "blockaded the Forest Department personnel", putting human lives at "risk". 

I would be nonetheless happy if that had been the case. Sadly, they were just three tigers, smaller than most other tigers living elsewhere, usually staying underfed and living a very difficult life. We, the humans, cornered their ancestors to the murky mangroves and took over their ancestral land — what we now call Bangladesh. 

So, why are the fear and stigma still so omnipresent? As the tiger now lives under our dominion, it is our national animal, and as its regality deserves respect, the wholesome fear and dramatisation did not make any sense. Was it wrong for the tigers to come out in the clearing that is technically surrounded by a jungle? 

Perhaps, the media could have been celebratory and merciful. Perhaps, the media, instead of blatantly marking tigers as ''threats'', could have just said ''tigers are now learning to live together with us'' and ''the phenomenon is a good portent.'' 

Ensuring human-tiger coexistence is what we all want and many organisations are working on achieving this goal. While the media, which in the world of information and technology shapes our psychology and perspective, continues to sketch a negative view of wildlife, not curing the trend will nullify all the efforts. It is de facto annulling everything and there is barely any visible conservation success. 

If there is continuous negative neural feeding, tell me, will it be easy for us to accept the small cats that live in the backyard? Will it be easy to let those kittens grow in the barn instead of, in the guise of a "rescue", removing and putting them in lifelong imprisonment? If this is our view of the national animal, what would happen…say… if a bear or a leopard were seen strolling near a Hill Tracts town? Would it be put down straight away?

There are scopes to work on correct media portrayals of wildlife. The issue has been plaguing almost every form of biodiversity in Bangladesh. In January 2023, a TV news channel, relentless in broadcasting spurious news on wildlife, did something unthinkable. They vilified the bees, the unambiguously most useful insect in the world! What did the bees do wrong? They formed a cluster of hives near a school compound in an agrarian landscape. In Bangladesh, where the usages of agrochemicals are so prevalent, bees in the wild are a rarity. The channel accused the bee of hurting and murdering livestock without relaying any solution. 

The problems with falsified news on wildlife are multi-pronged. Twisted truth, and at times blatant lies, can instil extreme fear and prejudice, unreasonable distrust and hatred. In the case of wildlife, it often culminates in retaliatory responses or "kill-on-sight" reactions. 

Small carnivores living in the homesteads are bearing the brunt. More specifically, the fishing cats are being decimated this way. Almost all news depicts this 15-kg cat as a "man-eating", "life-threatening" menace. Often, when a cat gets lynched or beaten to a pulp, the headline goes like "man fought with the tiger", "tiger caught from chicken coop", "tiger prowling in the metropolis", etc. The list goes on.  In truth, a fishing cat never has a single record of killing humans. Unless provoked, the cat is extremely shy and avoids human contact.

The importance of the right and careful media portrayal of wildlife is not a mere hypothesis. It is exactly similar to other sectors where the media formulates the mass overview, for example, gender roles, inter-race tolerance, etc. 

The 1975 movie Jaws by Steven Spielberg is a classic example. The movie showed a very wrong version of sharks by injecting fictitious content and sparked a worldwide fear of sharks. Sharks were shown to be bloodthirsty, kill-mongering, unkillable demons of the oceans. In reality, Florida Field Museum's International Shark Attack File shows that the yearly number of shark attacks on humans stands around 150, provoked and unprovoked combined. 

In contrast, National Geographic highlights that more than 100 million sharks are killed every year. Facts always help us understand reality. So much so the director publicly acknowledged the mistake and felt sorry for the impacts that spiralled out from the movie that the sharks had to sustain. 

A similar scenario is going on in Bangladesh. Overdramatisation often insinuates that wildlife means death, and the jungle means problems. Monstrous caricatures invariably result in intolerance and blur communal judgement with misinformation. One such example is the "tiger" in Purbachal, a suburban area near Dhaka. While in reality, it was two male fishing cats jousting for territory, multiple channels broadcasted the event as "tiger cubs" playing and implied that jungles in Purbachal need to be cleared, quoting the locals. 

The underlying reasons behind spurious news on wildlife encounters are not many. A "hooking" headline with intentions to increase readership or viewership is often the start of the issue. Such news carries no comment from the experts, often constructed solely on locals' perspectives. It is also made without any homework or fact-checking or lacks any constructive solution.  

The community of conservation practitioners is oblivious to the situation. But erroneous depictions are already taking a toll. News on mass unrest and sparks of fright upon encountering wildlife are rife. People appeared to be spooked and became retaliatory even seeing a mongoose as we saw in Sirajganj. A mongoose there was allegedly suspected to bite about 120 persons. We saw communities in Sherpur and Tangail living in fear upon seeing jungle cats. Even more sadly, the media marked the animals as caracal and cheetah respectively. Both cats live very far from Bangladesh. No attempt at fact-checking seemed evident. 

The dilapidated situation and the level of intolerance toward wildlife need to be rectified before it is too late. The bridge between scientists and journalists needs to be made stronger. Dialogue events and a set of ground rules can be set. A collective effort can sow a positive perspective on wildlife across the country. 

Standards of a responsible media depiction of wildlife 

• A responsible headline 

• Plenty of homework

• A narrative with a constructive solution

• Quoting an expert

• Not vilifying wildlife