The villagers living in the home of the Komodo Dragons are currently nervous and worried. For many years 4,000 villagers on the islands where the Komodo Dragons are had lived in peace with this closest-to-dinosaurs creatures. Only very recently the dragons seem to be more aggressive and have at least killed one 8-year old boy and 2 adults and many more injured since 2007.

Worried villagers say that they used to live peacefully with Komodos. The lizards never used to attack them or the children when they walk in the forest, no matter how dangerous they really are.

The komodo dragons are believed to be descendants of a larger lizard living on Indonesia’s Java island or Australia 30,000 years ago. They eat about 80% of their weight and go without eating for the next several weeks. Before 1994, villagers used to feed the komodos with bones and deer skin but since the government issued a policy in 1994 prohibiting the villagers to feed them the beasts have become hungry and now are more aggressive.

The reason for the policy was to “keep the komodo’s instinct and ability to hunt”. By feeding the animals, villagers are making them lazy and the animals will lose their ability to hunt and therefore are threatened to die and extinct. Ironically, now that the dragons are stimulated to hunt, the inhabitants of the islands are now the ones in danger. When they requested the government to build a high wall around the villages to keep the Komodo Dragon’s out, the idea was also rejected as the wall would be considered as a “strange thing in the middle of the national park”.

Fear now spreads over the islands of the komodos home. Even park rangers are nervous. Before the komodos were hungry, the villagers were “goofing around with the lizards, poking their tails, hugging their backs and running in front of them, pretending they’re being chased”. Now those days are over.

The government is currently campaigning to get the Komodo National Park into the New 7 Wonders of Nature. While they are trying hard to do what is best for the komodo dragons, the government should still prioritize human beings first and find a real solution to keep the villagers safe.

After all, in the beginning the world and everything in it was created for us and not the other way around.

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