One of India’s rarest and most hunted-down mammals turns out to be a cow – but not one of the bovine variety. The Dugong ‘sea-cow’ is a species of herbivorous mammal that lives underwater, frequenting India’s coastline in the North-West, East, and parts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
They’re gentle, shy creatures that avoid humans (unless the human is David Attenborough). All they want to do is graze the patches of sea grass to be found on the shallow coasts across parts of India and Sri Lanka – replenishing the local ecosystem in the process.
Unlike India’s terrestrial cows which are worshiped, the sea-cow became an endangered species out of a combination of hunting and habitat degradation. Millions of years ago, the Dugong’s ancestors were the first vegetarians of the mammal kingdom to seek a life underwater. For much of its known history, it had no real predator – except man.
Being social creatures, they graze in groups. A perfect target for country bombs, as villagers along the Palk Strait, proved in the 1980s.
Blast fishing is a practice of using explosives – country bombs, and later, dynamite – to stun large groups of fish to make their capture easier. The Dugong became a bombing target for its flesh – the meat of which is highly craved in the Tamil Nadu village of Kilakarai (so craved, that family feuds were known to happen if one side did not share their Dugong meat with the other). The fishermen’s aim is said to be so brutal that the mammals are often struck in the face by the explosion – not stunning, but killing them. In a single year between 1983-1984, 250 Dugongs were killed in two villages in the Ramanathapuram district alone.
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