Everything you love would, in all likelihood, kill you. Cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine and red meat are just some of the things that make up that list, or so we are told.
Add to that list the lean and tasty, but illegal frog meat or so the Goa Forest Department would have us believe, thanks to increasing use of agrochemicals, they say.
In an advisory, coinciding with the monsoon season when many species of frogs mate, breed, multiply, feed and recruit, the State Forest Department has warned that eating frog meat too can get you cancer among other life threatening diseases.
“Massive toxic recalcitrant residues from agrochemicals biomagnified in the food chain get accumulated in the fat deposits of frogs. Continuous consumption of frogs over a period of time could trigger paralytic strokes, cancers, kidney failures and other deformities,” reads the content of the advisory.
Come the first rains, the characteristic croaking of frogs, meant to attract mates, instead attracts poachers, both young and old, towards marshy fields, with a bright torch and gunny bag, wading through shin deep muck in the dead of the night to catch bullfrogs, loved for their taste.
“It is during this time that they become victims of their greatest predator — the human beings,” the Forest Department communiqué says.
Over the years, the Indian bullfrog and the Jerdon’s bullfrog have be colloquially re-christened, which evolved as a ‘code’ for frog meat in restaurants that couldn’t mention the contraband on their menu.
Either curried or fried with condiments, the meaty hind legs of the amphibian have had many poachers arrested through the active campaigns of civil society groups.
Yet the meat is continued to be sold in black and among trusted circles.
listed in the Schedule-I list of threatened species, the Indian bullfrog and the Jerdon’s bullfrog, which are eaten, are technically deserving of as much protection as the tiger.
But in Goa, with the passion and demand for frog meat increasing, the mating call also attracts the poachers who risk a stringent punishment of a `25,000 fine and or imprisonment up to three years, stipulated under the Wildlife Protection Act.
Awareness is also increasing with publicity campaigns by civil society groups highlight the need of the frogs to rein in diseases like malaria, filariasis and other diseases spread by insects, region’s ecological balance has increased. Despite arrests and publicity of the arrests, frog hunters are undeterred.
The Forest Department now feels that if not a fear of a fine or arrest, at least a caution of cancer could do the trick.
“It is a health hazard in a way because the frogs exist in the fields and their bodies do accept agrochemicals which are used liberally in the fields. These are cancerous elements. We are hoping that people will take note of it,” a senior wildlife official said claiming that the findings are based on a survey done by students of the Goa University.
But Miguel Braganza of the Botanical Society of Goa says that the warning might just be a deterrent.
“The health risks may have been amplified to deter people from eating frogs because punitive action just does not seem to work,” Braganza states.
Animal conservationists, like Clinton Vaz, have been at the forefront of the save the frog campaign for years now. He says that along with the Indian bullfrog and the Jerdon’s bullfrog species, other frog types like the Indian pond frog, grass frog and the common Indian toad are also occasionally poached.
“An insatiable demand at restaurants for illegal frog meat has ensured a lucrative return to the poacher for a pair of frog legs,” Vaz claims acknowledging that biomagnification of toxins in animal fat and
up the food chain was a well documented phenomenon.
“The frogs virtually live all their active life in these toxin-infested waters. It is no doubt that they are in their body fat,” Vaz said.
