Indian Rhinos in Nepal Vanish
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 3rd, 2007
On January 3, 2007, Scientific American shared the news that a group of rare, re-located Indian (Great One-horned) rhinocercos have disappeared. It was announced in Kathmandu that they have mysteriously vanished from a nature reserve in southwest Nepal.
The article by Gopal Sharma continues:
Authorities introduced 72 rhinos, also known as the Indian rhinoceros, in the Babai Valley, 320 km (200 miles) southwest of Kathmandu, as part of a conservation drive that started in 1984.
“We have records showing 23 rhinos had died due to poaching or other causes. The rest are missing,” Laxmi Prasad Manandhar, a senior official at the Department of National Park and Wildlife Conservation, said.
But he ruled out the possibility of all the 49 missing rhinos falling prey to poachers.
“If poachers had killed them they should have left behind the bodies” after taking away the horn, he said, adding that just one rhino skeleton had been found during an extensive search in June.
“Where did they go? I have no answer. It is a mystery,” Manandhar said.
The rhinos were moved to Babai Valley from Chitwan National Park on Nepal’s southern plains under a conservation scheme supported by global conservation group WWF.
In December, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the government to step up security at Chitwan — the Himalayan nation’s biggest rhino reserve — after local media reported at least 10 animals had been killed since July.
Officials say at least 12 rhinos had died in the past six months in Chitwan where their population dropped to 372 in 2005 from 544 in 2000.
Their numbers fell mainly due to poaching for horns which are believed to have aphrodisiac qualities and are in great demand in China.
In the Babai Valley, rhinos were last seen seven years ago when several security posts were closed due to threats from the Maoist rebels who targeted them during their decade-long insurgency against Nepal’s monarchy.
The Maoists declared a ceasefire in April and signed a peace deal with the government in November, allowing easier and safer movement of forestry officials.
Nepal began its rhino conservation drive 30 years ago when the population fell to 108 animals from around 800 in 1950. One-horned rhinos are also found in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.
The one-horned species of the rhinoceros has been one of the greatest conservation success stories in South Asia. With strict protection, especially in India, their total numbers have touched around 2,500 from 100 about a century ago.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
History has shown that communism, maoism and facism have no place in their ideologies for conservation.
It is amazing that the conservation of natural resources and wildlife has developed from capitalist societies; we conserve and protect because we can finally “afford” to. Panda conservation in China was started because the West paid for it.
I am afraid that if the Maoists got anywhere near those rhinos (and what beautiful creatures Indian rhino are) they will never be found. Sad.
Hmmm…applying joppa’s argument, and looking at the conservation record of civilized Western countries as a model, “democracy” isn’t really conservation-friendly, either. Then we have the US (not even close to resembling a democracy, given the last two “elections”)… which soars to great new heights of resource mismanagement.
The Maoists (for whom I admittedly have no love — Mao is one of my most detested all-time fascists, along with Ann Coulter)have no direct link to the poaching. They threatened security posts that had a link to rhino conservation, but the information we have doesn’t suggest that the Maoists targeted the rhinos directly. The fighting in Nepal has nothing to do with a natural resource — unlike the Iraq war.
By that same token, the vanishing rhinos have nothing to do with ideology. Let’s not forget that Nepal is still technically a monarchy in transition to becoming a parliamentary democracy like Canada and most of the commonwealth nations.
What joppa fails to comprehend are the socioeconomic realities that turn individuals into poachers. They are individuals struggling to feed starving families, or individuals struggling to pay their hashish supplier. Their harsh socioeconomic realities drive them to desperate action to meet whatever realities they find themselves facing. By no means am I advocating their actions, however, it is ridiculous to suggest that ideology is the root of poaching (unless we’re talking about oil poachers).
Perhaps they found a way to move to another location? That would be reasonable, moving away from poachers. Maybe we will hear reports from some nearby place about them,It would be funny if they turn out to be behind some ‘crypt’ animal reports in the general area.
Got to agree with joppa. I’m sure they were sold off piece by piece at Chinese markets.
It is most likely they were killed by poachers, in which case this sad episode highlights how quickly animal remains vanish – an important point for cryptozoologists. It is also possible a few have found really good cover in remote corners of the refuge and are hanging on. Remember, it was only in December 2005 that a camera provided proof the Vietnamese population of the Javan rhino still existed, several years after it was generally written off.
I was wondering if the Maoist guerrillas in Nepal might have killed them or eaten them. Fascism, however, was the proto-typical green movement. That is not much remembered, but their earth-worship was all of a piece with their neo-pagan, post-modern ideology.
We’re getting a bit off topic, but there is obviously some intersection between ideologies and conservation.
In the old USSR, the environment in general was trashed, sometimes on a stunning scale, and whales were caught with no regard for limits or protected species. Hunting preserves reserved for the party elite did help the Siberian tiger (which has fared much worse since the regime fell) and Kamchata’s brown bears (and perhaps its cryptic black one). China, still largely a political dictatorship, has likewise been very bad for the environment in many cases but has showcased massive efforts, including executing poachers, to protect the panda.
Any time ideological clashes escalate to armed conflict, it’s usually a very bad thing for animals, as law enforcement or forestry personnel are driven out and weapons from land mines to artillery barrages to defoliants are used without consideration of the effects on wildlife. Conservation gets shoved aside in war, whether it’s Vietcong roasting a kouprey or the US logging out the Singer Tract. There are flukes where this works in the other direction: some writers think the “extinct” Japanese wolf made a comeback when WWII drained the provinces of hunters and farmers.
I think a case can be made that conservation in general has done better under democratic governments, at least in the past century. Still, no nation has a spotless record.
To bring this back to the Nepali rhinos, it’s quite possible they were killed by the Maoists, eaten for sustenance while their horns were sold to finance further operations. There is probably an entire book to be written about how conflict affects conservation and how, in some cases, very brave people have managed to save animals or habitat from destruction.
Great post MB. I am reminded of how the wolf population of central Russia rebounded after the Nazis decimated the humanity and the heroic steps taken to save animals in the Kuwaiti Zoo during the last Gulf War.
We can only hope that some kindly Yetis have herded the survivors into some remote jungle valley and they are safe and sound in a Crypto-Shangri La.