MOST people in the world these days live in towns or cities. They have forgotten that one of the concerns of country-dwellers is attacks by wild animals. In urban living the most constant and arguably the greater danger is from traffic. But out in the countryside people still worry about wild animals. Only rarely is it a matter of danger to humans. More often than not, it is a fox or wild dogs raiding the hen coop or attacking a herd of sheep.

Many farmers have learned to their cost just how much damage wild animals can do to farm animals carefully bred over the years. Yet although few would hesitate to fetch their rifle and shoot dead a wild beast that is threatening their stock, most people who work the land take little pleasure in such a killing. Those who spend their lives in the outdoors, working the soil to earn a living, whatever the weather, have an understanding and a sympathy for the land, which is probably very hard for a city dweller to appreciate.

Animals that attack stock, also feed on other wild animals. Nature has its order. A fox will feed on rodents such as rats that might otherwise boom in numbers and pose a serious threat to human communities. Therefore the same wild animal that poses a threat to a farmer also actually offers a real benefit as well.

This is important to bear in mind at the moment. There is considerable outrage that a Saudi farmer has killed an extremely rare leopard. That anger has become the greater, because the Saudi Wildlife Commission has decided not to prosecute the man. The decision was made after a careful review of all the facts of the case.

There can be no doubt that the death of this beautiful wild animal is a cause for great sadness. Yet the leopard is believed to have abandoned its normal mountain hunting area because of lack of food. It attacked a herd of camels, killing several. The farmer who owned some of the animals sought to deal with the attacker, by poisoning the carcass of one of its victims. Sure enough the leopard returned to eat more of its kill. The poison killed it.

Environmentalists have quite understandably been in despair at the loss of one of a highly endangered species. Some very harsh words have been said about the farmer. They have not been justified. For a start the poor man had no idea that the animal that had been killing his animals was a rare leopard. What he did know was that he and neighboring farmers had been losing an increasing number of camels. This was costing them thousands of riyals. Maybe he should have made a greater effort to find out what it was that was killing his stock. If he had realized it was a leopard, he could have reported it to the authorities. They could have shot it with a tranquilizer dart and returned it to its home hunting ground. Maybe. Maybe. As so often in important and difficult circumstances like this, the “maybes” quickly mount up. But the harsh reality is that the farmer had to act, in the same way that a businessman in the city would take steps to better protect his property if it had been burgled.

The hue and cry, demanding that this man be prosecuted and fined is therefore entirely wrong. Nevertheless, this tragic incident has served at least one valuable purpose. It has alerted many in the Kingdom to the danger facing, not just the leopard, but many other species of wild animal, including even the once extremely plentiful dhab lizard.

From the earliest times, there has always been a conflict between man and the natural world that he has come to dominate so successfully. It is not just predator species that have been wiped out. The destruction of rain forest and other ecosystems now threatens the existence of little-known flora and fauna, whose contribution to medical science, as well as their role in Nature, has still not been understood.

Therefore it is not a liberal environmentalist agenda that should be driving the argument for better conservation of the natural world, but a higher degree of self-interest. There will always be a balance to be struck. The dilemma facing the farmer and his attacked camels demonstrates how difficult this will always be. There is, however, apparently an irony in the leopard’s behavior. One reason it had abandoned its normal territory was that hunters, the majority city folk, had been on hunting expeditions, not of course for the leopard, which is a protected species, but for the prey upon which the leopard normally feeds.