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Guwahati: India's one-horned rhinoceros faces an uncertain future in the country's northeast, its main home, because of unending poaching and shrinking of the habitat so vital for the animal's survival.
Last year alone, poachers killed at least 20 rhinoceroses in and around Assam's sprawling Kaziranga national park. This year, the toll has already reached seven, officials said.
The 430-sq km park, with around 1,800 rhinoceroses, has the world's largest population of this primitive mammal.
Two other reserves in Assam, Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary and Orang National Park, have around 150 rhinoceroses.
Three rhinoceroses were killed in Orang this year.
Countrywide, the rhino population could be just over 2,200, including in West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, said Prabal Sarkar of the NGO Wildlife Trust of India (WTI).
The rhino once roamed almost all over the Gangetic plain. Its numbers fell sharply over the decades because of depleted grassland habitat and frequent hunting - to feed the illegal rhino horn trade.
Experts say these animals are killed for their horn, which is used as aphrodisiac by some tribes in the northeast and in some Asian countries.
"A rhino horn could fetch between Rs500,000 and Rs1 million in the international market. Traders also sell the horn in pieces or in powder form," said Sarkar, who studies the rhino horn trade in the region.
"Its demand in the Asian traditional medicine market is perhaps the single largest factor for its poaching throughout its home range," he said.
Pitfalls
A small population of around 400 rhinoceroses can also be found in Nepal's Chitwan National Park, Bardia National Park and Suklapantha National Park.
In the 1980s, poachers commonly used the pit-poaching technique to trap rhinoceroses in Kaziranga. The method involves digging a pit and covering it with leaves and grass. The animal gets trapped when it steps on the camouflage. Poachers then kill the animal.
This involves constant monitoring of the animal, mainly to establish its path and to dig a trap, which is not easy. Hence, poachers at times electrocute the animal.
Last year, forest guards found a tranquilliser inside the park, raising fears the instrument might have been illegally brought to kill rhinoceroses. Such guns don't make any noise and their detection is near impossible.
Gunshots alert forest guards. Hence poachers carry out pit-poaching or electrocution. But sometimes they also use noiseless sophisticated guns.
Last year, poachers shot dead a pregnant rhinoceros even as authorities were looking for clues for previous crimes of rhino poaching at the Kaziranga park.
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