Kill The Notification, Not The Animal

**Ishita Sharma

Abstract: India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 contains two pathways to lethal authorisation: Section 11, which requires case-by-case justification tied to a specific dangerous animal, and Section 62, which allows the Central Government to declare an entire species ‘vermin,’ stripping statutory protection at scale without evidence, expert review, or mandatory recording of outcomes. The 2022 amendment widened Section 62’s practical reach by collapsing multiple schedules into one, bringing hundreds of additional species within the notifiable set. Drawing on Balakrishnan and Radhakrishna’s study of the Kerala wild pig vermin campaign and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence under Article 51A(g) of the Constitution, this paper argues that vermin declarations are driven by political mobilisation rather than scientific assessment, and that the institutional architecture structurally rewards authorisation over prevention. It takes a no-kill position: the State should meet conflict with infrastructure, rapid response, and fair repair, not with a licence to kill.

Keywords: Multispecies justice; Wildlife Protection Act; vermin declarations; human-wildlife conflict; no-kill governance

INTRODUCTION

In May 2020, a pregnant wild elephant in Kerala’s Palakkad district bit into a pineapple laced with an explosive set to deter wild boar from cropland. Her jaw and tongue were destroyed and she died standing in a river. The incident reflects a pattern seen across India’s conflict-prone regions: when official mitigation is perceived as slow or distrusted, farmers turn to cheap, unregulated deterrents that cannot distinguish between a crop-raiding boar and a passing elephant. The crisis has only deepened. Between 2021 and 2025, human-wildlife encounters killed 344 people in Kerala, and in early 2026, after years of failed requests to the Centre for a vermin declaration against wild boar under Section 62 of the Wildlife Protection Act, the state forwarded its own Wildlife Protection Bill to the President, seeking to bypass the Centre entirely. The question posed then is institutional: what legal design would make non-lethal prevention credible enough to stop conflict from devolving into unaccountable violence?

This paper argues that answering that question requires a multispecies justice frame which holds that humans and non-human animals share ecological worlds and that legal and political frameworks should account for animal interests as more than instrumental value. Yes, conflict causes real harm: lost crops, injury, death. But conflict is rarely caused by animals alone, it is produced by land-use change, habitat fragmentation, and governance failures that push animals into settled areas. The State must protect human life, but the dilemma is worsened, by policy shortcuts that authorise killing at scale without evidence, exhausting alternatives, recording what happens afterward. This paper takes a no-kill position: if the State’s default response is authorisation to kill, it is converting institutional failure into violence against animals.

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF KILLING

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 (“WPA”) contains two pathways to lethal authorisation. This is relevant to look into because they determine whether the State must justify killing or merely announce it. Section 11 empowers the Chief Wildlife Warden (“CWLW”), a state’s most senior wildlife officer, to permit killing case by case. For Schedule I species (elephants, tigers, and others facing the highest extinction risk), Section 11(1)(a) allows killing only where the animal threatens human life or is diseased beyond recovery. Crop damage, however severe, is not enough. The 2002 amendment tightened this further: no killing unless the CWLW is satisfied the animal cannot be captured, tranquilised, or translocated first. This means the WPA itself already contains a no-kill-first principle for the most endangered species and lethal force is a last resort. For Schedule II species (wild boar, nilgai), Section 11(1)(b) sets a lower bar, crop damage counts, and delegation to junior officers is permitted, but every decision must still be in writing with stated reasons tied to a specific animal. 

Section 62 abandons this logic altogether. It empowers the Central Government to declare an entire species ‘vermin’ for a specified area and period, stripping all statutory protection so that anyone may kill. This is not a decision about a dangerous animal that must be justified on the facts, it is a blanket reclassification. The provision requires no scientific evidence, population data, expert consultation, limit on scope or duration, culling protocol, and no obligation to record how many animals are killed or whether non-target species are harmed. So, the State can authorise mass killing and never account for its results and it has done so repeatedly each time without independent scientific review.

The 2022 amendment made this architecture more dangerous. It reduced the WPA’s six schedules to four, abolishing Schedule V (the old vermin list) and collapsing former Schedules III and IV into a single Schedule II. Section 62 was rewritten to apply only to ‘Schedule II’ species, which looks narrower than the old text, but the amendment folded all of them into Schedule II, which is now the sole schedule Section 62 targets. Previously,  Under the old Act, hundreds of species, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and mammals, sat in Schedules III and IV, beyond Section 62’s practical reach. The report by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy estimated that at least 41 mammals, 864 birds, 17 reptiles and amphibians, and 58 insects entered the set of species the Centre can now declare vermin. The reform that was presented as rationalisation in fact widened the killing power while making it look restrained. Furthermore, because Schedule V no longer exists, a declared species does not move into a defined legal category; it simply drops out of protection entirely, making it harder for us to track which species are currently unprotected and where.

The result is a system with two speeds. Section 11 is slow and accountable: the State must investigate, decide, and justify. Section 62 is fast and unconstrained: the State need only notify. Prevention, the costliest option, requires building fences, training teams, paying compensation, and governing land use. Therefore, when a state faces political pressure, the WPA does not merely permit it to choose the fastest route; it structurally rewards that choice by making it also the one with the fewest constraints.

THE POLITICS OF EVIDENCE AND ‘NECESSITY’

This  architecture creates a predictable outcome: when conflict intensifies, the system pushes towards Section 62 rather than towards prevention. The question is what evidence supports these declarations, and the answer is: less than the government claims. A  2025 Lok Sabha reply reveals that conflict data for some species are not centrally compiled. So, the Centre issues declarations on the basis of state requests it cannot independently verify. Conflict is framed as crop loss because crop damage is visible and politically compelling. But evidence suggests that for species linked to fatalities, the largest welfare losses come from injury and death. This mismatch is consequential: a vermin declaration responds to the crop-loss framing by authorising killing, but killing does not build a barrier at a settlement edge, fund an emergency response team, or reduce the time it takes to reach an injured farmer. The Supreme Court appears to have recognised this in 2016, when it issued a caveat that culling should be confined to animals entering human habitations, not forests. That caveat is a safety-at-the-boundary principle: it points towards physical prevention and rapid response at the points where animals and humans actually meet, not towards broad species-wide killing permissions.

The hardest challenge to a no-kill position is the claim of necessity: a farmer whose child has been killed, or whose livelihood destroyed overnight, faces a concrete, urgent harm. But ‘necessity’ is constructed as much as it is discovered. Balakrishnan and Radhakrishna (2025), studying the Kerala wild pig vermin campaign leading to the 2026 Bill, find that the push for vermin status was driven by socio-political pressures, not scientific damage assessment, but the government frames such declarations as evidence-based responses to ecological crisis, which is the problem. At the farmer level, support for killing reflects governance frustration as much as loss: eroded agency and chronically slow compensation. The demand by Kerala’s government and farmers’ organisations for a Section 62 declaration is an attempt to reclaim the capacity the WPA removed, to be able to hunt freely, but granting it punishes the animal for a failure that belongs to the State.

Even the measurement of damage is unreliable. Balakrishnan and Radhakrishna show that compensation records, self-reports, and raid frequencies do not converge: Higher claim volumes may reflect better-organised farmers’ associations rather than worse damage, meaning the ‘evidence’ triggering vermin requests tracks who can mobilise, not where harm is greatest. Species selection confirms the distortion: elephants were the most reported depredator in petitions, yet wild pig became the vermin target, because elephants are cultural icons whose killing is politically costly, while wild pig is historically classified as huntable meat. The species that gets the label is not the one causing the most harm; it is the one whose killing is cheapest. And even if the evidence were sound, culling would remain a poor tool. Miguel et al. (2020), reviewing wildlife culling for disease control, show that populations commonly rebound through compensatory reproduction and immigration, while culling-induced social disruption can disperse animals into new territories, potentially increasing contact with humans. Culled populations tend to rebound because reduced competition lets survivors breed more, and killing disrupts territorial structures, pushing survivors into new areas and potentially increasing human contact.

CONCLUSION

The State owes conflict-affected communities fast, auditable compensation; physical barriers at hotspots; early warning and rapid-response teams; and governance of the upstream conditions, fragmented corridors, boundary-insensitive land use, uncontrolled attractants, that manufacture conflict. To the animals, it owes compassion and respect for their lives, having their own inherent value. Vidhi’s recommended safeguards concede that uncontrolled lethal power is too risky to grant; the question is whether adding conditions redeems the power or merely confirms it should not exist. 

The no-kill approach requires implementation because the alternative has already been tested and has failed: Bihar culled nearly 5,000 nilgai between 2016 and 2020 after declaring them vermin, yet farmers continued to suffer losses, and by 2021 the state had abandoned culling in favour of sterilisation, implicitly conceding that killing had not worked. International best practice confirms what India’s own experience suggests: the IUCN SSC Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence (2023) treats conflict as a social and institutional problem requiring planned prevention and locally legitimate solutions which must address root causes rather than target species. A no-kill approach is also not aspirational, it is already being practiced. Sri Lanka, which faces human-elephant conflict at a scale comparable to India’s, imposes the death penalty for killing an elephant and has built its mitigation strategy around electric fencing, corridor protection, and habitat enrichment rather than lethal declarations. Bhutan, whose constitution mandates that 60% of the country remain under forest cover, has adopted a ‘Conflict to Coexistence’ strategy that combines solar fencing, bio-acoustic deterrents, wildlife passages, rapid response teams, and community-based monitoring, rejecting mass culling despite facing conflict from the same species India struggles with: elephants, wild boar, tigers, and leopards. Lastly, Kenya has also pioneered crop-damage insurance schemes that provide private-sector risk coverage, removing the financial pressure that drives demand for killing. In conclusion, the idea is to invest in the conditions that prevent conflict in the first place. 

A no-kill stance is legally intelligible as much as it is morally sound. In Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja (2014), the Supreme Court grounded animal welfare in Article 51A(g)’s constitutional duty ‘to have compassion for living creatures,’ reading animal life within an eco-centric frame that recognises intrinsic worth. This shifts what the State must justify: animal life is a constitutional value, not a cost, and the State bears the burden of showing why lethal policy is consistent with that value. A no-kill position also takes seriously what lethal power cannot undo: once carried out, killing is irreversible, and once killing is authorised at scale without supervision or protocols, there is no way to ensure it is done humanely, and ‘success’ becomes body counts rather than reduced human suffering.

**Ishita Sharma is a fourth-year law student at Jindal Global Law School, India. She is passionate about gender justice and social equity. Her interests span across law, social work, and public policy, with a commitment to advocating for systemic change and helping those in need.

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.