"Problem animals" such as tigers and leopards are routinely eliminated by state government machineries in an act that is represented as the "hunting down" of "man-eaters", and framed as a public service. In a country where hunting is illegal, it is not the final elimination of the animal, but the process of hunting which is a method of territorialising the animal and human audiences. As seen in two recent incidents of hunting man-eating leopards in north India, this process invokes anachronistic hunting imagery. Elimination of problem animals should be done without fuss and spectacle, so that larger wildlife conservation aims are not obfuscated.
