India Closes Park to Catch Elephant Killers
© Environment News Service (ENS) 2001
December 10, 2001
By Vidya Deshpande
NEW DELHI, India, December 10, 2001 (ENS) - Rajaji National Park in the Himalayan foothills has been closed to visitors after the killing of two elephants for their tusks. Four platoons of Provincial Armed Constabulary and 300 forest guards and rangers are combing the park for the poachers.
The two male elephants were poisoned to death and their tusks chopped off with axes in the Ghori Range of the park. A villager who resides inside the park discovered the bodies of the elephants Sunday. Rajaji authorities fear that the poachers may still be inside the park and may have poisoned more elephants.
Mud tracks in the forest show that one of the poisoned elephants, a young, sub-adult male, dragged itself on its forelegs for nearly a mile before collapsing. The second elephant, a 35 year old bull, was found some distance away from the first.
A Gujjar tribal woman from Ganga Bhogpur village first discovered the dead elephants. She was collecting firewood when she stumbled upon one of the bodies and informed the forest ranger of the deaths.
Rajaji Park Director Sunil Pande rushed to the scene. He told reporters that the older elephant has been frequently spotted in this area and was last seen by a park ranger on December 3. He said that the elephants were probably killed on the night of December 4-5.
Rajaji National Park is a protected area covering 840 square kilometers (324 square miles) of pristine forest area in India's northern state of Uttaranchal. It adjoins Corbett National Park which now includes the Sonanadi Wildlife Sanctuary to the west.
The three protected areas together hold the largest concentration of male Asian elephants in the world. Out of the estimated 1,000 elephants that live in this range, more than a third are believed to be males with tusks, known locally as tuskers. Experts believe that the adult male to female ratio in this range is 1:2, the best anywhere in the range of the Asian elephant.
Asian elephants live in 13 countries in South and Southeast Asia. Asian elephants are found in: Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Indonesia, Kampuchea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Of the global population of 45,000 Asian elephants, more than half are found in India.
The largest populations in India are found in the northeast and southern states. Poaching in these areas has been on such a large scale that the male to female ration has dropped to 1:25.
The Corbett-Sonanadi-Rajaji belt, important as the western limit of the Asian elephant, had been relatively free of elephant poaching, until poachers stuck there last January, killing seven tuskers. However, poachers in this region have regularly killed big cats like the tiger and leopard as well as deer.
The elephants were killed barely 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the holy town of Rishikesh, famous for the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Swami Sivananada.
The Uttaranchal Chief Wildlife Warden A.S. Negi said the government is offering a reward of Rs. 50,000 ($US2,500) to anyone providing information about the poachers that will lead to their arrest and conviction.
Negi has ordered an inquiry into the incident and says that punitive action will be taken against any park personnel found guilty of dereliction of duty. He said the fact that a villager, and not the forest staff, spotted the dead elephants, indicated dereliction of duty.
Negi said the adjoining Corbett Park has also been put on alert, as he feared that the poachers could have escaped into Corbett.
The Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) has sent Rs 10,000 (US$500) in emergency funding to the forest department to assist in tracing the poachers.
Ashok Kumar, WTI trustee and senior advisor, said, "Ivory traders found it increasingly unprofitable to collect from the south, which was the traditional source. It was just a matter of time before the attention shifted to the population in Corbett-Sonanadi-Rajaji belt."
"We have activated our intelligence network and will pass on any information that we gather about the suspects to the park authorities," he said.
Last month, WTI trained all the forest staff of Rajaji National Park in anti-poaching skills and equipped each of them with an anti-poaching kit including a sleeping bag, jacket, ground sheet, torch, water bottle, rucksack, and all-weather boots.
These latest elephant poisonings are part of an ongoing pattern of attacks on Indian tuskers. Between December 2000 and February 2001, seven elephants in Corbett National Park were found dead. The poachers shot the animals with poison arrows and extracted the ivory tusks.
This summer in the Sonitpur district of Assam state, 31 elephants were poisoned to death. Twenty were killed in and around Nameri National Park between July 3 and August 13. In the next month, four elephants were poisoned in Charduar Reserve Forest, and seven elephants were poisoned in Goroimari near Tezpur airport. Before the airport was established there, the area was a Reserve Forest.