Forest warden Narendra Man Babu Pradhan is on the frontline of Nepal’s battle against poachers, and he grimaces as he recalls the recent discovery of an injured rhino whose horn had been cut off.
“We found a male rhino with bullet in his head around a lake in the park. It was a horrific sight,” said Pradhan, who was informed by tour guides about the injured animal.
“The poachers had cut the horn off without killing it and it seemed in great pain,” said the chief warden of the Chitwan National Park in southwest Nepal, a UNESCO world heritage site popular with foreign tourists.
PHOTO: AFP
Pradhan, who said the incident was the worst of his 20-year wildlife career, did everything he could to save the rhino, but it died within two weeks.
In Nepal, poaching is getting worse, conservationists say, and the country has emerged as a hub for the illegal trade in animal parts given its strategic location between India, the source of material, and the Chinese market.
Porous borders, a lack of coordination between countries in the region and political instability in Nepal mean the men with guns and underworld connections are gaining the upper hand.
“The disappearance of tigers and seizures of skins, bones and rhino horns indicate poaching and trafficking is growing,” said Shiva Raj Bhatta, a spokesman at Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. “Our wildlife is in a critical stage. We believe Nepal is fast developing as an international hub for wildlife trade and turning into a poacher’s paradise.”
Chitwan Park has lost 24 rhinos — 17 of them killed by poachers — in the past 18 months.
The figures for Asian big cats are not encouraging either.
A new tiger census carried out earlier this year showed that there were 121 adult tigers in Nepal’s parks. In two parks in southwestern Nepal, the numbers fell by 60 percent, from 65 to 26.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who sent a video message to a tiger conservation forum at the end of last month, said that traders and poachers were better organized than policymakers and conservationists.
“At present the illegal trade in wildlife is estimated [per year] at over 10 billion [US] dollars across Asia — second only to weapons and drug smuggling,” he said.
In India, where tiger numbers are dwindling, experts say the border between India and Nepal serves as the principal route for contraband from India to the main market in China.
Poachers bribe poor forest dwellers to guide them through the dense jungles.
Part of the problem in Nepal, Bhatta said, is that recent political turmoil has handed smugglers the opportunity to expand their operations.
Nepal’s decade-long civil war between Maoist rebels and the state ended in 2006 with a UN-brokered peace agreement.
Since then the country has seen tumultuous change, with the ultra-leftists winning landmark polls, abolishing the 240-year-old monarchy and declaring Nepal a secular state before their government fell in May.
“Before the peace accord, the army used to be mobilized both inside and outside the parks, which created a psychological deterrent to the poachers,” Bhatta said. “Now the army is confined just inside the parks and in barracks.”
Tiger and leopard parts, rhino horns, otter skins, live birds and turtles are known to pass through Nepal.
Rhino horns are highly valued as an aphrodisiac in China, and are used to make dagger handles in Arab countries.
Tigers attract huge sums of money in Asia, with their body parts used in traditional medicine and aphrodisiacs, while their skins are used for furniture and decoration.
A single tiger skin fetches a maximum of about US$1,000 in the local market, but more than US$10,000 internationally.
A single rhino horn can fetch as much as US$14,000 on the international black market, experts say.
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