This is Babiya, the 'vegetarian' crocodile who eats rice

December 31, 2017

Photo source: Twitter

A vegetarian crocodile, Babiya, lives in Sri Lanka. That is the opinion of the priests of the Sri Anandapadmanabha Swamy temple in the village of Ananthapura in the Kasaragod district. The priests carry the animal, which has been living in the waters of the temple for seventy years, by hand a kilo of rice every day. The crocodile, which is regarded as a saint, is handled by one of the priests twice a day. "Babiya is harmless. She is the crocodile of God, "it sounds. The priests believe that Babiya is a messenger from Lord Padmanabhan, who has disappeared into the cave that the crocodile now occupies. As a result, she is also seen as the guardian of the cave, since she spends most of her time there. Twice a day she comes to the temple, where she is faithfully fed by one of the priests. Every day she gets a kilo of rice, which is fed her by hand. The priests even have so much faith in their 'pet' that they even go into the water and swim while she is in the neighborhood. "I will feed her at eight o'clock in the morning and then later in the afternoon", says Chandra Prakash, who has been taking care of her the last ten years now, and actually puts the rice in the mouth of the animal. "She does not get meat, she does not even attack the fish in the lake," he says.

The priests therefore believe that the crocodile only survives on the rice that is offered to her daily, but crocodile experts think otherwise. "Crocodiles are very intelligent animals and real survivors," says Anirban Chaudhuri. "This is a Muggar crocodile, which normally eats wild fish and large and small mammals," he says. "Normally she would always go for his natural diet, but it is plausible that the crocodile eats the fish in the lake and as learned behavior also eats the rice twice a day as an addition to her normal diet. She will typically catch her fish late at night and catch very early in the morning, so the priests think she will never eat fish: because they never see her hunt. " That the crocodile in his seventy years at the temple never attacked anyone, Chaudhuri surprises nothing. "Crocodiles can learn a lot. It is even easier to tame a crocodile than a dog. It is quite normal that it forms a bond with the person who feed it. She will only attack if she feels threatened. Someone who does not know how to deal with her can therefore better stay away. "