The tiger did not know it had become a governance problem.

For months, Forest Department staff tracked its movements across a fragmented mosaic of farms, roads, villages, and remaining forests in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district. Reports of the tiger killing six people had triggered a familiar sequence of events. Veterinarians were mobilised. Tranquilising equipment was assembled and checked. Camera traps were placed along likely movement routes. Then came the waiting.

A live bait was tethered at a strategic location. Before dawn, veterinarians, forest officers, shooters, and field staff took position inside a hide and in nearby vehicles. Hours passed. Eventually, the tiger appeared. A dart was fired.

Once immobilised, the animal was monitored for breathing, heart rate, and temperature. Biological samples were collected. Measurements recorded. It was loaded into a transport crate and moved to a transit facility. By evening, the operation was recorded as a successful intervention. The official story was straightforward: a conflict animal had been removed.

Though I was not present at the moment of capture, I had participated in earlier stages of the search. What stayed with me was not the tiger itself but the infrastructure assembled around it. Veterinary expertise, transport logistics, monitoring networks, administrative approvals, field intelligence, and weeks of staff time all converged on a single outcome. What appeared as one action was, in reality, the visible edge of a much larger system.

That system is expanding, not because conservation is failing, but because in many places it is succeeding. For much of the 20th century, conservation was defined by loss. Tigers were disappearing from India’s forests. Wolves vanished across much of Western Europe. Large mammals retreated globally under pressure from habitat loss and persecution. The central task was preventing extinction.

Unresolved issues

Today, in many regions, the trajectory has shifted. India’s tiger population increased from 1,411 individuals in 2006 to 3,682 in 2022, according to the National Tiger Conservation Authority. Large carnivores now spill over into agricultural land, production forests, and human-dominated landscapes rather than remaining confined to protected areas.

This is widely celebrated as success. Yet it raises a question conservation was never well equipped to answer: what happens when wildlife returns to landscapes still institutionally organised as human space?

As a wildlife biologist working in India’s tiger landscapes, I have spent many years in these environments. They are not wildernesses. They are paddy fields, village commons, irrigation reservoirs, grazing areas, roadsides, and fragmented forests. Here, encounters between people and wildlife are not rare; they are routine. When these encounters become politically or socially costly, the response is often immediate and visible.

A leopard enters a settlement and is trapped. An elephant damages crops and is captured. A tiger implicated in attacks is tranquilised and removed. These interventions are sometimes necessary, especially when human life is at risk. Few would dispute that. The problem emerges when measures designed for exceptional circumstances become routine instruments of governance.

Across India, capture, relocation, and confinement are increasingly embedded in wildlife management. Maharashtra’s sugarcane landscapes have seen repeated leopard trapping operations, with over 100 leopards captured. In Chandrapur, dozens of tigers have been captured over the last decade, many ending up in captivity. Karnataka has captured more than a hundred elephants since 2013. In Madhya Pradesh, more than 900 blackbuck and nilgai were relocated following crop damage complaints.

Across species and States, a pattern emerges: when wildlife creates friction, moving animals often seems easier than addressing the conditions that produced the encounter. Capture is attractive because it is visible and administratively legible. It produces a sense of resolution. The animal is removed; the situation appears to be under control.

The deeper drivers of conflict are less cooperative. Habitat fragmentation, blocked corridors, infrastructure expansion, declining prey, livestock vulnerability, unmanaged waste, and weak compensation systems require long-term investment and political patience. Capturing an animal does not. Ecological systems rarely conform to administrative convenience.

Research on leopard translocations in India found that relocated animals often continued moving through human-dominated landscapes and sometimes generated conflict elsewhere. Global reviews of carnivore translocations show similarly uneven outcomes: animals fail to establish territories, return to capture sites, or remain unmonitored long enough for outcomes to be known.

The problem is not only that relocation sometimes fails. It is that removal rarely addresses the conditions that produced conflict in the first place.

A leopard removed from sugarcane fields does not change the fact that sugarcane provides cover and prey for others. A tiger taken from a crowded landscape leaves ecological space that may be filled by another. An elephant moved away from farms does not restore the corridor that brought it there. Conflict is often not resolved. It is redistributed.

This raises a question that increasingly lingers: how many animals will we capture? Not because capture is unjustified, though it often is. But because there is no clear endpoint to its demand.

Default destinations

If landscapes remain fragmented and wildlife populations continue recovering, encounters will continue. Historically, conservation focussed on keeping wildlife inside designated spaces. Increasingly, it is about managing wildlife outside them. The consequences are visible in rescue centres and captive facilities. Many institutions originally designed for rehabilitation now house growing number of animals removed from contested landscapes, some for years, others permanently. Large private facilities such as Vantara, capable of housing substantial numbers of animals, have become increasingly prominent within this system.

So, at what point does conservation shift from sustaining wildlife in ecosystems to managing displaced individuals after coexistence has broken down? When does a rescue centre become a repository of animals removed from their habitats because governance systems could not accommodate them in the wild?

These are not arguments against rescue centres or zoos. They perform important welfare functions. The concern arises when captivity becomes the default destination for animals that systems cannot otherwise manage. The social consequences mirror this imbalance.

Affected communities often receive the most visible response, animal removal, while underlying vulnerabilities persist. Compensation delays continue. Livestock losses and human deaths recur. Corridors remain blocked. The same villages experience repeated incidents even as successive animals are captured. Removal can produce reassurance without producing security.

The fate of captured animals is often unclear. Some survive and establish territories. Some return. Some spend years in captivity. Some die. Systematic follow-up is limited. The International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies post-release monitoring as essential to evaluating translocation outcomes. But long-term data remain sparse. How many survive? How many reproduce? How many return? How many generate new conflicts? These are scientific questions but also questions of governance.

Without systematic monitoring, capture risks becoming reflex rather than evidence-based intervention, shaped by urgency and political pressure rather than by outcomes. For decades, conservation feared a world without wildlife. Increasingly, it faces a different challenge: wildlife has returned, but institutions remain only partially prepared to govern that return.

India is not alone. Across Europe, wolf recovery has triggered renewed debates over control. In North America, bears and mountain lions are routinely relocated or euthanised after entering human settlements. The details vary. The underlying tension does not.

If success continues to be measured mainly in population growth, conservation risks a paradox of its own making: celebrating recovery while expanding the very systems designed to remove the animals that recovery has produced.

Capture will always have a place in genuine emergencies. But if every encounter becomes a case for removal, conservation risks becoming a system without an endpoint. The question is no longer technical, but unavoidable: how many animals can be captured before we accept that we are not solving the problem at all?

Ashraf Shaikh is a wildlife biologist and conservation researcher based in India.

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