In the dead of night on February 15, gunshots blasted the guards into action in India’s Kaziranga National Park. Rangers stationed in a nearby camp quickly spread out, searching for the shooters under the light of a nearly full moon – to no avail.
By morning, they’d located the victim, the park’s first poaching casualty of 2017: a female Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis). They inspected her 3,500-pound body, which was riddled with bullet holes and collected 11 spent cartridges from an AK-47 assault rifle. The gouged wound on her nose marked the spot where her horn had been hacked off.
Welcome to the rhino wars.
Indian (or greater one-horned) rhinos once lived across the subcontinent from Pakistan to Bangladesh. Today they hang on in just a handful of sites in Nepal and India. Kaziranga, in the northeast state of Assam, is the last real stronghold for this massive, prehistoric-looking animal – home to about two-thirds of the 3,500 that remain.
It’s a precarious situation. According to the IUCN, “any catastrophic event in Kaziranga (such as disease, civil disorder, poaching, habitat loss, etc.) would have a devastating impact on the status of this species.”
One of those threats is ever-present. Aron White, a wildlife expert with the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), says that “poaching is the main threat to the survival of rhinos today, driven by demand for their horns.”
Sharon Guynup is a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center, where she is working on a book about environmental crime. She writes for National Geographic, The New York Times, and other publications.
Sources: International Union for Conservation of Nature, Mongabay.
Photo Credit: Guards on patrol in Kaziranga National Park, India, used with permission courtesy of Steve Winter/National Geographic Creative.
