MADI, Nepal — Surya Prasad Paudel, a lean 42-year-old with an aquiline nose, sunken eyes and gray facial hair, stands waveringly in front of his mud house with the sunlight bathing the straw thatched roof a golden hue. On his phone, he scrolls through images of his recently slaughtered goats, prey to a leopard (Panthera pardus) that struck in the dark of the night. “We hear tigers growl right next to our house almost every night,” Paudel says, still scrolling through the stark photos. He says he wants to claim compensation, but the process for doing so is a jumble of red tape, leaving him and many others in a state of confusion and helplessness. Farmer Surya Prasad Paudel stands in front of his house in Madi, Chitwan. Image by Abhaya Raj Joshi Paudel and his family live in Nepal’s Madi Valley, a settlement of 38,295 people spread across an area twice the size of Paris. To its south rises the hill of Someshwor, on the other side of which lies India. The settlement, comprising Indigenous Tharu, Bote and Darai peoples, as well as hill migrants, is encircled on its three other sides by Chitwan National Park. The valley is part of a vital transboundary corridor for animals such as endangered tigers (Panthera tigris), facilitating their movement between Chitwan and India’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve. This also makes Madi the epicenter of human-wildlife interactions in Nepal, says Rishi Subedi from the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC), a semigovernmental body, are…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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