How are the number of animals over their entire range regulated? The intrinsic tendency is for these numbers to increase unless checked by factors such as predation, diseases, limitation by resources like food or nesting holes and accidental mortality such as through floods or landslides. Charles Darwin came up with an amusing illustration. He said that numbers of even slow breathing large mammals like elephants will go on increasing unless checked by such factors so that in 750 years these elephants stacked one over the other would reach one sixth of the distance from Earth to the Moon!” Obviously factors such as the imaginary balance of nature within the forest ecosystems are not going to be involved in regulating the numbers of our major wildlife species, with much of their population outside the forest areas. Predation has to be the major regulatory factor and all along humans have been the most significant predator of a whole range of wildlife species such as elephants on the Indian subcontinent. As already mentioned, elephants colonized the Indian subcontinent much later than humans and humans began hunting them as soon as they came on the scene. This hunting is depicted in the 10,000-year-old cave paintings of Bhimbetka in Narmada Valley. An anthology of romantic yerses composed around 2,000 years ago in the same region called Gathasaptasati describes how a young man must prove his manhood by hunting an elephant before he can hope to acquire a bride. In the swanky club of tea estate owners in Munnar in Kerala legs of tables are made of lower sections of the legs of elephants they had hunted. This predation has suddenly ceased with the
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