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Eastern Himalayas
Answering the Call of the Rhino
2008 Spring Report
This article is a part of WWF's 2008 Spring Report.
See more articles.
Tom Dillon, WWF’s senior vice president for field programs, recounts how national political instability in Nepal gave rise to new waves of rhino poaching and what WWF staff and community volunteers did in response.
By Tom Dillon
Chitwan National Park is a magical place, nestled in the Terai grasslands along the border of India and Nepal, tucked away in the shadow of the Himalayas. For centuries, the best way to get around here has been on the back of an elephant, and it still is. From this vantage point high above the rhinos and tigers, I gaze out over the beauty and mystery of this landscape. In my mind’s eye, I imagine what this place looked like when Rhinoceros unicornis, the greater one-horned rhino, roamed across the entire northern part of the Indian subcontinent.
When the elephant I am riding stops abruptly, I am just as abruptly brought back from my vision of past abundance. I am back in the present, where the pressures of the 21st century are at work threatening this place and its greater one-horned rhinos. But then, that’s why I’m here, working to save this ancient juggernaut, the largest of all rhino species.
WWF On the Ground in Nepal Since the 1960s, Nepal has been a pivotal country for WWF. Our focus in the early years was species conservation, in particular for the Bengal tiger and greater one-horned rhino. Over the years we’ve broadened our scope and today field work here benefits from our landscape approach to conservation and is made possible through our growing network of relationships with the government of Nepal, local nongovernmental groups and, in particular, local communities.
For example, we have worked with local communities to restore fragmented forests as part of our vision of one contiguous landscape connecting 11 protected areas along the border of Nepal and India. When we began this work Chitwan was the only one of these areas with rhinos. In the last couple of decades, WWF and our partners have successfully moved more healthy rhinos from Chitwan to Bardia National Park and Shukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve in Nepal and to Dudwa National Park in India. And we have been actively engaged in reining in the forces that threaten species most – habitat loss and wildlife trade.
© Jeff Foott/WWF
The Pattern of Rhino Poaching Wildlife trade is big business, with global annual values in the billions of dollars and profit margins rivaling those for illegal drug trafficking. In traditional Asian pharmacies, the price of rhino horn can be as much as tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram.
For close to four decades, WWF helped keep rhino poaching at relatively low numbers throughout Nepal. But in Chitwan in the late 1990s, poaching increased dramatically and in 2002, at the peak of the Maoist armed conflict in Nepal, 38 rhinos were poached in and around Chitwan. As things calmed down politically, the number of rhinos lost to poaching declined, to 22 in 2003 and 11 in 2004. Everyone, including the experts at WWF, anticipated that the poaching would slow when the conflict ended.
We were all mistaken: Despite best efforts, in 2005, 13 rhinos were poached, taking the population down to 372, roughly the same number as in 1988. We faced a setback of 17 years. In 2006, with another 20 lost, the picture darkened.
Operation Unicornis in the Field Troubled by this unanticipated turn of events, WWF decided to go beyond formerly effective responses and think about the poaching problem differently. Thus was born Operation Unicornis, a swiftly conceived and rapidly ramped-up effort involving intensive rhino protection, massive community mobilization, and risky undercover investigations.
First: Study the Opposition’s Game Plan In the past, most poaching took place within the park, where security kept the activity to a minimum. Typically, antipoaching actions were mobilized at the first sign of illegal killing, and the situation would be stabilized.
But when we studied the location and timing of poaching incidents for 2005 and 2006, we saw two significant differences. Most of the poaching for those two years occurred at the edges of the park and in the buffer zones and national forests beyond the edges – areas where security arrangements were particularly weak. And most of it seemed to be suspiciously timed to coincide with the end of a round of antipoaching activities.
Second: Write Our Own Game Plan Anil Manandhar, head of WWF in Nepal, masterminded and led Operation Unicornis, working with a team of four dedicated staff. Armed with a clearer take on the nature of the problem – in particular that the rhinos were being killed outside the park – the team knew it needed to galvanize concerted government and community action.
With 50 percent of park revenues going directly to neighboring communities for their development needs, and with student Eco Clubs active in many villages, Anil and his team believed that community members joining in direct rhino protection would tip the scales.
Third: Pull Out All the Stops Operations within the protected areas would need to be strengthened: We encouraged the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation to remobilize the Armed Forest Guards who had been disarmed during the political unrest. And we supported the expansion of security posts from 8 back up to 20, along with increased regular patrolling.
We recruited former members of the Army and police to patrol outside the protected area. Their intelligence-gathering skills and courage would be critical, as the stakes were high and the work risky. On motorbike and bicycle, by day and at night, they moved around in areas familiar to them. They dressed as locals to increase the chances of collecting information about the poachers and their illegal markets for rhino horn and hoof.
We trained six Nepalis to use global positioning systems (GPS) equipment to track rhinos outside the park. And we engaged local youths in Eco Clubs as volunteers. In teams of 50 to 150, they supplemented the squads of adults, even guarding individual rhinos through the night.
All of these allies in the battle against poachers collected information and passed it on to us. We relayed it to our contacts in the key government departments so they could take action. In one example, over the course of just 10 days in December 2006, 13 individuals were arrested on charges related to poaching and illegal wildlife activities.
Students from Eco Clubs in Chitwan head to Nepal’s Ministry of Forest and oil Conservation carrying a petition in support of rhinos. In just eight days, 480 students collected 101,500 signatures on a white cloth close to a half a mile long, raising public awareness about rhino poaching along the way.
© WWF/Nepal
A Massive Show of Support A related grassroots effort succeeded in calling attention to the problem at the highest levels of the government. We mobilized the Eco Club youths who collected more than 100 thousand signatures in support of rhinos on a petition that they presented to the government. All the national daily newspapers reported this show of support from the community around Chitwan.
The massive petition stirred up so much attention that in January 2007 a special session of Parliament was called for the exclusive purpose of discussing rhino conservation. At that session, the Greater One-horned Rhinoceros Conservation Action Plan for Nepal was officially launched. This plan is a comprehensive program of solutions we helped to develop. The plan will be directed by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Nepal’s Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation.
The Future of Rhinos in Nepal As a result of the concerted actions of our staff and partners, poachers were caught, rhino parts were confiscated en route to illegal markets, and many planned poaching incidents were derailed in time. The proof: The number of rhinos poached in and around Chitwan National Park in 2007 fell to only one.
With poaching low again, natural population growth, through newborn calves reaching adulthood, allows the population to rebound. In March, the rhino count we conduct every three years proved the point. The Chitwan rhino population, at 372 in 2005, had grown to 408.
While this is great news for Chitwan, rhino poaching continues in other places, such as Nepal’s Bardia National Park and Kaziranga National Park in India. Our goal for 2008 is to expand Operation Unicornis to protect the diminishing rhino population in Bardia, the second largest stronghold for rhinos in Nepal.
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