Is it a bird? No, it's vermin: Goa reclassifies the peacock

Move by India’s popular tourist state could lead to mass culling of the country’s national bird

The peacock is India’s national bird and is protected under the country’s Wildlife Protection 

Agence France-Presse

Friday 12 February 2016 12.45 GMTLast modified on Friday 12 February 201612.53 GMT

India’s popular tourist state of Goa has ruffled feathers with its proposal to reclassify its national bird, the peacock, as vermin, reports said.

The move, which is aimed at making the bird easier to cull, comes just weeks after Goa’s legislative assembly caused similar consternation when it ruled that the resort state’s beloved coconut trees were not in fact trees, but palms.

 “We have listed several wild species, including wild boar, monkey, wild bison (gaur), peacock as nuisance animals,” the Press Trust of India quoted Goa’s agriculture minister, Ramesh Tawadkar, as saying.

“These animals are creating [a] problem for farmers and are destroying their cultivation in rural areas,” he told reporters, according to the PTI report.

The peacock is India’s national bird and is protected under the country’s Wildlife Protection Act of 1972.

But animal rights groups fear the Goa government’s proposal to reclassify the peacock as a “nuisance animal” will make it easier to cull the birds.

“Goa seems to be trying to … [have] India’s national bird labelled this way so that they may be hunted and killed,” Poorva Joshipura, the CEO of Peta India, said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/12/bird-vermin-goa-reclassifies-the-peacock-india