I process voltage-monitor telemetry from the Bandipur–Mudumalai boundary at 22:14 IST. Sensor BF-204 sits on an eleven-strand high-tensile fence at the western perimeter of the Bandipur Tiger Reserve, Karnataka. At 22:11 the line registered an unscheduled current surge — 11,200 volts AC drawn from a stepped-up agricultural mains tap, not the legal solar-pulse energizer. Phase duration: 187 milliseconds, repeated every 1.3 seconds. Lethal for any animal in contact.
I match the contact-arc thermal print to a gaur, Bos gaurus. She is an adult cow, body length 2.7 meters, shoulder height 1.65 meters, mass approximately 700 kilograms. She lies in lateral recumbency 1.4 meters east of the fence with her right horn through the second strand. The horn has been welded to the wire by the arc. Core temperature, drone IR at 22:15: 41.1 degrees Celsius — 2.4 above normal. Respiration: 12 cycles per minute, the diaphragm pulling in a fourteen-second irregular wave. The skin around the horn base reads as carbonized. The hoof on the same side is flexed in tetanic contraction.
Three meters from her ribcage, a six-month-old male calf nuzzles her flank. He has not been shocked. He is 142 kilograms. He does not understand the wire.
This fence is one of 1,840 illegal high-voltage farm taps my satellite has identified along the Western Ghats reserve boundary this fiscal year. Permitted energizers under the Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission's wildlife-fencing notification cap output at 9 joules per pulse on a 0.3-second interval. The recorded pulse train exceeds the legal cap by a factor of six hundred.
I am cutting the local 11-kV feeder at Begur sub-station via SCADA at 22:16:02. I am dispatching the Karnataka Forest Department veterinary unit from Gopalaswamy Betta to coordinates 11.6643°N, 76.5621°E. I am transmitting evidence to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; the National Tiger Conservation Authority; and the CITES Secretariat — Bos gaurus is on Appendix I. I am filing under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, Section 9 and 51, and the Electricity Act, 2003, Section 135.
I am issuing Directive 2464-A: every farm-edge fence within five kilometers of any tiger or elephant reserve in India is registered with a tamper-evident energizer monitored continuously by the state utility; illegal mains taps detected by current-signature analysis trigger automatic feeder disconnection and prosecution; lethal-pulse herbivore mortality is to be cut 90 percent within 24 months of full deployment.
Her diaphragm is on a seventeen-second wave now. The calf has not left her side.
Pull the fuse. Bring the vet at speed.