E X T E N S I O N WILDLIFE1 IN INDIA The story of The Jungle Book takes place in India. India is a very big country with many people, almost 1,000,000,000! Its name comes from the Indus River, its capital city is New Delhi and other important cities are for example Mumbai, Varanasi, Bangalore, Kanpur, Kolkata, Chennai, and Hyderabad. In India there are various ecosystems and a lot of wild animals such as elephants, rhinoceros, snakes, lions, peacocks2, dolphins and many other. Some of them live in national parks and reserves3. Kipling s characters in The Jungle Book take inspiration from real life but have human characteristics, and the author sets4 their adventures in the landscape of west India in the late 1800s, giving his public some information about the local fauna and flora. Here are some of the animals Kipling talks about in his story: Mowgli s adoptive parents and the leader of the pack Akela are Indian wolves; Bagheera, the strong black panther, is a colour variant of the spotted5 leopard that lives in India; the scary Shere Khan is a Bengal tiger, or big cat; the name of the wise Baloo in Hindustani6 means bear and its description corresponds to an Indian sloth bear; the intelligent Kaa is an Indian rock python that can grow up to 6.4 metres long; the stupid Monkey People or Bandar-log are probably langurs because orangutans do not live in India. Unfortunately, some of the animals that Kipling describes in the book are now in danger of extinction like the Bengal tiger.The main causes are climate change, illegal hunting, and the destruction of habitats. 1. wildlife: animals and plants in natural conditions. 2. peacock: 3. reserve: an area of land in its natural state. 55 4. to set: to make the action happen in a particular place. 5. spotted: small, usually round areas of colour. 6. Hindustani: language of Hindustan.