They gave the wrong drug, say experts

They gave the wrong drug, say experts
AJAY SURI

NEW DELHI, JULY 5: While the jury is still out on what exactly caused the disaster, top wildlife experts, interviewed by The Indian Express all agree on one point: Berelin should not have been administered to the tigers in the first place.

The proper medicine is a drug called Tranquin. But it's expensive and it has too short and sensitive a life-span to be stored effectively in any of the cash-strapped zoos in the country. So experts say speedy intervention is the key--something that didn't happen at Nandankanan.

Says B M Arora, well-known expert at the prestigious Indian Veterinary Research Institute at Bareilly: ``Berelin is essentially a preventive, and not a curative drug. For trypanosomiasis, the blood infection that knocked the tigers down, it was definitely not the right choice. This was like giving Disprin to cure viral infection. It just won't work.''

Arora admits that Tranquin is not an easy-to-get drug but says that the Nandankanan staff should have woken up immediately after the first tiger died. ``The search for Tranquin should have been started much earlier,'' he says.

This morning, frantic messages were sent to zoos across the country and an SOS to the Alipore Zoo in Calcutta to rush Tranquin for the tigers who are battling for survival. Project Tiger director P K Sen isn't hopeful. ``The remaining ones are bound to die sooner rather than later.'' Ironically, this zoo which boasts of having the largest collection of tigers in captivity anywhere in the world also has a history of this disease. In 1996, a tiger died here of trypanosomiasis, says Sen. Thereafter, two more tigers died in Patna zoo.

Arora says that the fact that the tigers in Nandankanan roam freely inside a large safari park could also have posed problems for the staff to administer Berelin in time. ``Had the tigers been in a small enclosure, as in a normal zoo, the magnitude of the tragedy could have been much lower,'' he says.

Ashok Kumar, president of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), however, says the custodians of Nandankanan cannot be let off the hook so easily. ``The zoo has much more controlled conditions than a forest. They could have acted more responsibly,'' he insists.

According to reports reaching WPSI, Kumar points out, the staff in Nandankanan apparently misjudged the body-weight of tigers before pumping Berelin into them. ``This, if true, was a grave and unpardonable error,'' he says. According to experts, 0.8 gram of Berelin per 100 pounds is the right dosage. Anything above it can be lethal, as was proved with a lion in Kanpur Zoo a few years ago.

Though zoo tigers are in no way related to their wild, and often healthy brethren, the incident is bound to cast its shadow worldwide. Said a senior official in the Union Environment Ministry on condition of anonymity, ``It will show how much we care for our most precious creature which, as things stand today, is already on the way to extinction. What happened in Nandankanan is the biggest blot on the tiger conservation movement in the country.''