When I was a young kid, I had seen people coming to our paddy fields with sacks and bags and catching fish. I was little afraid of those people back then but never realized the impact it has on humanity.
Apparently in 1978 India had banned the export of frog legs. The following news article from 1978 contains amusing facts.
Stopping the frog-leap - India Today, 1978
"Last year frog legs worth Rs 7.80 crores were exported to Europe and the United States. This year the figure is
expected to touch Rs 15 crores. "That's a lot of money," said P. Inayatullah of Overseas Marine Products, a Madras-based firm that has an annual turnover of Rs 1.5 crores in shrimp and frog leg exports. "And it's going to go down the drain simply because the Government thinks killing frogs is cruel," he lamented."
"a scientist in Hyderabad was given a President's Award for discovering a painless method of killing frogs."
The article portrays more but, IMHO the president's award for painless killing of Frogs stands out !
(Fresh frog legs sold in a market in Paris, [France])
But now the story is different. There are none left and the elders say we have all these mosquitoes because of the mass eradication of frogs and other small creatures. Now we are ended up in scenarios like this:
(Photo Taken on January 18, 2009, Kochi, Kerala, India & originally uploaded under the name Brutality Against mosquitoes. I later found this photograph used by politicians!!, health awareness campaigns etc)
This is why when it comes to these otherwise silly creatures we have decided to safe keep them. So in our compound we have aquariums, small ponds with water plants, water lilly etc and few smaller frogs. This was how things were last year, but now this has taken a different turn. From the occasional frog and a snake that attempts to catch the frog, we have at least 2 dozen frogs in the compound. Last week I decided to move them from our aquariums to smaller ponds as they are happily eating my fish !
So I caught all of them, moved them to the a pond behind the house, the next day they came back, I did the capture + transport again. By the 3rd or 4th day, majority of them were in the small ponds and only 3 came back to my aquariums.
It was fun.
But the real discovery was about our dog — who is very ferocious when it comes to rats, birds and even mosquitoes.
Our dog had befriended the frogs & as per parents, the dog is not only hurting the frogs he is even protecting the frogs from the snakes !
Not all frogs value a dog's friendship !!!
The frog leg photo is from :
All other photos are shared under Creative Commons Share Alike licenses & taken by me.
No frogs were hurt or killed in the process. Though they might have been terrified.