Wild and Wilful by Neha Sinha: a book review

Author: Neha Sinha Publisher: ‎Harper Collins

Reviewed by Syed Ahtisham Raza Naqvi        11 November 2021

Wild and Willful is a non-fiction work by Neha Sinha-a conservation biologist based in India. The book is righty titled wild and willful since it describes both wild species as they are (free and in their own independent world) and simultaneously exposes the man’s environmental hypocrisy. People keep preaching about climate, biodiversity, animal habitat, and even UN summits are held on climate and environment but at the same time encroaching upon the wild continue. Forests keep shrinking, burning, encroached in the name of development, and species one after the other keep going extinct amid the whole big and loud sloganeering on wildlife conservation and allied theatrics on it. In this book, an attempt has been made to portray the bigger picture of India’s wildlife conservation. This work is a lucid attempt to highlight the animal rights struggle and the loss being caused to animal habitat due to deforestation.

This book is organized into three habitat zones (units) – Prithvi, Akash, and Jal (Earth, Sky, and Water) and highlights the 15 iconic Indian species and effectively portrays India’s ecological journey that has had successes and failures.

The book is divided into 11 small chapters. These chapters about animals, birds, and reptiles mix profile and scathing comments, joy, and irony, and give us an idea of what humans are doing to the environment. The author begins with a description of leopards and moves to hungry tigers, Amur falcons, cobras, elephants, and many others, revealing nature’s breath-taking diversity, a trait that weakens as mankind progresses.

The author maintains that these animals are not harmful except in certain situations. Those who know them understand that these animals need our care, love, and acceptance. They have their freedom but our greed makes them a slave. The author emphasizes the importance of science in human and animal life through her skillful prose, The Wild and the Willful reveals the magic and importance of wildlife in our daily lives (p. 213).

The author has provided depth and intrinsic character to each species. Stories from the effects of rapid urbanization on leopards to how butterflies reflect the health of an ecosystem and more. The predominant notion of predatory animals like leopards is that of killers, invincible attackers. Whereas other life-forms attach their lives to the presence of predatory animals through the intentional and rhythmic inter-species communication of myriad forms, our limited understanding of predators precludes any association with fear.

The chapter ‘The Monkey Joint Family’ on monkeys describes the people who feed and adore these animals. The book makes us realize what has changed in man’s behavior now that they hunt such animals even for one cup of star bucks coffee.

The chapter on snakes, Don’t Kiss a Cobra, draws attention to the dangers of snakes and also emphasizes that “there is no snake that slips so easily between hatred and devotion like a cobra (p. 69)”.

The chapter ‘’The Phoenix of the Desert’’ reflects the plight of habitat specialists such as the great Indian bustard and the white-bellied heron, both of which are critically endangered. While we may do well in helping our national animal and the country’s heritage animal continues to exist, both can survive in a wide variety of habitats, sadly we can’t boast about wildlife species, which may be where they live. The development of giant solar panels in the desert did not account for the impacts of large-scale, poorly-located renewable power plants in the Thar Desert, the last stronghold of the great Indian bustard.

Similarly, the story of the Ganges Dolphin, the national aquatic animal of India, is no different. The reader is prompted to imagine the sonic perceptual world of dolphins. The presence of dolphins is under threat, especially after the National Waterways Act was passed in 2016.