I often see them running along the edges of the paddy fields here and have spent sometime trying to identify them properly, but whether they’re the Indian Gray Mongoose, or the Small Asian Mongoose, they wreak the same havoc amongst the villagers’ chickens. A few nights back, one checked out the contents of the tea making table on the balcony, leaving its tale tell teeny footprints.
I have watched enchanted as the resident pair here played rough and tumble like a couple of kittens. So cute! Then came the grim news that they had killed the family’s four adolescent chickens, just starting to fledge towards adult birds; full grown chickens are a little too big for them. Yesterday from high on the rooftop, I watched as the mongoose pair skittered around the farmyard, playing a cheeky sort of cat and mouse (or mongoose and chicken) game with the hens. They searched out the small henhouse thoroughly, checking for new laid eggs I imagine (which they also relish).
I have noticed in these parts that no one ever makes a ‘serious attempt’ to get rid of these predators. All they ever do is shout angrily at them and chase them off, as with the marauding macaques making off regularly with armfuls of corncobs. Back in western industrialised countries like the UK, a farmer simply reaches for a shotgun, or lays traps. The attitude here seems very different, and there appears more of a preparedness to accept their rights to co-existence, if reluctantly. In India where the population of urbanised Rhesus macaque monkeys is completely out of control in many city centres, complex strategies to try and remove them back into the forests are employed, or introducing the larger more docile Hanuman langurs, never extermination.
So, for the time being, the cute little mongooses are here to stay. Their prowess catching venomous snakes and scorpions is legendary, and they enjoy mice and rats too, so there is clearly an advantage to their being here, be it occasionally a mixed blessing.
Picture of mongoose courtesy of Robin Backhouse 2015