A second appeal is usually where a losing litigant's luck runs out, and that is exactly what happened to the State of Kerala before Justice Mohammed Nias C.P. this week. The State had gone up in appeal against two courts that had already ruled against it, both holding the government liable to pay compensation to a Wayanad resident hurt in a wild elephant attack. The High Court dismissed the appeal, and in doing so, rejected the argument the State has leaned on for years whenever a wild animal causes harm: that it cannot be made to pay because it does not own the animal and was nowhere near the scene.
The underlying dispute began modestly, as these cases usually do, with a civil suit for damages filed by a man injured in an elephant attack in Wayanad. The Munsiff's Court at Kalpetta found in his favour and awarded compensation. The State carried the matter to the Sub Court at Sulthanbathery in a first appeal and lost there too. Two courts, examining the same facts twice, reached the same conclusion. That kind of concurrence is ordinarily difficult to upset in a second appeal, which is confined to substantial questions of law rather than a fresh look at the facts.
Before Justice Nias, the State repeated its familiar defence. Wild elephants are not livestock kept in a government shed; nobody feeds them, fences them, or controls where they wander, so the argument runs that the State cannot be treated as an owner answerable for the animal's conduct the way a cattle owner would be for a bull that gores a neighbour. It is an argument with obvious intuitive appeal, and it has worked often enough in the past to keep showing up in the State's pleadings.
Justice Nias was not persuaded. He held that the absence of ownership or physical custody over wildlife does not, by itself, take the State out of the liability net for the harm that wildlife causes. His reasoning builds on a line he has been developing through this year's run of human-wildlife conflict litigation out of Wayanad, where the State's statutory role in managing and protecting wild animals under the Wildlife Protection Act has repeatedly been read as carrying a corresponding responsibility toward people injured by the animals it is charged with conserving. A State cannot claim the regulatory power to control hunting, capture and movement of wildlife while disclaiming every consequence of the animals it protects.
There is also a second appeal hurdle the State had to clear before the Court could even reach the merits of its ownership argument. A second appeal under the Code of Civil Procedure lies only on a substantial question of law, and two concurrent findings of fact against the appellant make that threshold harder still to meet. The Munsiff and the Sub Judge had both accepted that the injury occurred and that compensation was due; the only real argument left to the State was a legal one about who can be made to answer for a wild animal's conduct, and that is the argument the High Court went on to reject.
On a separate point that routinely trips up victims, the judgment deals with whether a modest ex gratia payment under the government's compensation scheme forecloses a full civil claim. The Court made clear it does not. Where the ex gratia amount paid under the scheme falls short of what the injury actually warrants, the victim remains free to approach a civil court and seek adequate compensation through an ordinary suit for damages, exactly as the plaintiff in this case did. The ex gratia scheme functions as a floor, not a ceiling, and certainly not a substitute for judicial redress when the administrative payout proves inadequate.
Forest departments and the state treasury carry the practical weight of this reasoning, since every successful claim of this kind draws on public funds rather than any insurance pool specific to wildlife. Officials who have treated the ex gratia scheme as a final settlement of the State's exposure will now have to budget for the possibility that a dissatisfied claimant can still litigate for more, and that the courts will not let the State's own regulatory distance from the animal serve as a shield.
For lawyers handling human-wildlife conflict claims, particularly out of forest-fringe districts such as Wayanad, Idukki and Malappuram, the ruling closes off a defence the State has relied on reflexively. Civil courts hearing such suits now have a High Court second-appeal judgment telling them, in terms, that the State's lack of ownership over the animal is not a complete answer, and that a claimant unhappy with an ex gratia payout has a live remedy in the ordinary courts rather than being stuck with whatever the compensation scheme hands out administratively.