Punjab has almost no wilderness. Its forest cover is under four per cent, the lowest or nearly the lowest of any Indian state, and nearly all of it is in the Shivalik belt and along canals and roads.
The Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary in Fazilka district is unusual: it is farmland, and the blackbuck in it are protected by the Bishnoi community, whose religious code forbids harming animals or cutting green trees. There are no fences and the animals live in the fields.
Other protected areas are Harike, Kathlaur Kushlian, Takhni Rehmapur and Bir sanctuaries, mostly small.
The species Punjab has lost include the cheetah, the lion, the tiger and the swamp deer, all of which were here within recorded history. The Punjab urial and the hog deer survive in fragments.
The Indus river dolphin in the Beas is the state's flagship wild animal and its population is in the low tens.
A landscape farmed this intensively cannot hold much, and what it does hold survives because particular communities decided it should.
The blackbuck at Abohar, the hog deer and wild boar in the river bets, the nilgai everywhere, and the leopard and sambar in the Shivaliks are what is left of the large fauna.
The plain was open grassland and scrub with cheetah, wolf, gazelle and antelope on it within living memory of the nineteenth century records. Almost all of that went with the plough.
Punjab's wildlife protection is concentrated in a handful of small reserves. The state has the least forest and the most cultivation of any Indian state and the fauna reflects it exactly.