The reporting and interviews for this story were conducted in February 2019.

For Anil Mistry, a 52-year-old conservationist born and raised on Bali Island in the Sundarbans region of West Bengal, protecting nature and the people living within it is at the heart of his identity.

For the founder of the Bali Nature and Conservation Society, this wasn’t always a way of life. In fact, before he turned to nature conservation, he hunted animals living in the wild with his family and friends. For his forefathers, hunting was the way to survive and make ends meet.

“My grandfather and his six sons, including my father, migrated from Bangladesh in the early 1950s to settlements like Hemnagar and Kumirmari in West Bengal, before settling on Bali Island. It was a forest at the time, part of which they cut down to establish their habitat. Naturally, they poached deer, tigers, birds, wild boars and other forms of wildlife. When I grew up, I automatically learnt how to hunt,” says Mistry, in a conversation with The Better India.

However, everything changed one fine day in 1990.

“After graduation, I would play football with my friends and then hunt deer for pleasure. One day, when my friends and I were out hunting, they shot a doe that was there with her small fawn. Seeing the doe in pain and her fawn in tears, I felt great pain. That’s when my determination to end poaching began. Immediately after the incident, I went to the forest department and met the then field director, Pradeep Shukla. I confessed to the incident,” says Mistry.

In response, the senior forest official........

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