JALPAIGURI: Foresters at Jaldapara national park on Saturday morning recovered a carcass of an adult male rhino from the Bania beat in Chilapata range. The body of the rhino had its horn missing. This is the seventh rhino carcass recovered from Jaldapara over the past one year.
An autopsy of the animal carcass revealed that it died at least five days ago and that it was shot dead. By the time patrolling parties could trace the carcass, the horn was chopped off.
Incidents of poaching are not new for Jaldapara. Over 70 rhinos have been poached at Jaldapara in different times from 1951. Poaching reached maximum height in between 1968 and 1972 when as many as 28 rhinos were poached.
In October 2009, a gang of hunters shot and injured a rhino, which escaped out of the forest only to be confronted by villagers armed with stones and sticks. The frightened animal fell into the Torsha River and died. In June 2011 a poaching bid was foiled at Jaldapara after foresters on patrol located the poachers and chased them out of the forest.
The Jaldapara national park is one among four forest tracts in India where the one-horned rhino can be seen in the wild. The others are Assam's Kaziranga and Manas national parks and Bengal's Gorumara National Park. Rhinos can also be seen in the Terai region of Nepal. There are about 3,000 Indian rhinos in the wild, half of them in Kaziranga alone. Jaldapara has around 200 animals and attracts thousands of tourists every year.
Conservationists blame it on the lack of staffs for the consistent poaching of animals in Bengal. According to AnimeshBasu of Himalayan Nature and Adventure Foundation the forest department has a present staff shortage by 36 percent. "Whenever we say to fill up the posts, officials give us assurances. But nothing happens. It is because of the staff shortage that the gap between foresters and forest villagers is increasing giving rise to poaching and timber smuggling," said Basu.
