Stray dogs hunt red panda on fringes of Singalila National Park

The Times of India , Saturday, April 04, 2015
Correspondent : Krishnendu Mukherjee
KOLKATA: A full-grown red panda, which is considered threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), was hunted by a pack of stray dogs just outside Singalila National Park in Darjeeling on Thursday.

However, foresters said that the panda's post-mortem report was yet to arrive and the exact reason of the death could only be confirmed after that. Forest department officials suspect that a leopard might also have killed it. While talking to TOI, the DFO of Darjeeling forest division, B R Seva, said that the forest guards found the carcass while patrolling the area on Thursday evening.

State's chief wildlife warden Azam Zaidi said that the red panda had somehow come out of the national park's boundary. "It usually remains atop tree branches. But, somehow it came out of the park on Thursday evening and was hunted by a few stray dogs in the area," Zaidi added.

"It happened in the Dhotre forest block which is outside Singalila National Park. We have sent the body to Darjeeling zoo for post-mortem. Nothing can be ruled out now, only the post-mortem will confirm the reason of the death. There were injury marks on its neck. So, we suspect that it could have been attacked by a leopard too," said Seva.

The red panda (Ailurus fulgens), also called lesser panda, red bear-cat and red cat-bear, is a small arboreal mammal native to the eastern Himalayas and south-western China that has been classified as vulnerable by IUCN as its wild population is estimated at less than 10,000 mature individuals. The population continues to decline and is threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching, and inbreeding depression, although red pandas are protected by national laws in their range countries. It is not closely related to the giant panda.

Conservationists said if it was actually killed by stray dogs then it would bring to fore slack patrolling in the area. State wildlife advisory board member Biswajit Roy Chowdhury said: "This is most unfortunate. Though there have been reports of stray dogs disturbing wildlife in other states, this may be the first such incident reported in Bengal."

A pack of stray dogs had recently hunted a deer just outside the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. A wild dog was also reportedly seen mating with a stray dog inside Maharashtra's Tadoba National Park recently, while four cases of barking deer and one case of a mouse deer hounded by stray dogs have also been reported from Kerala's Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary.

"A channel for the spread of diseases from stray dogs to wildlife can be a fairly high probability rate of dogs getting hybridized with wild canid species. Dogs hybridizing with jackals are often observed in Wayanad and Kannur districts of Kerala," said a recent report by the Centre for Wildlife Studies, Kerala and Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in Wayanad.

 
SOURCE : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Stray-dogs-hunt-red-panda-on-fringes-of-Singalila-National-Park/articleshow/46799697.cms
 


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