June 18, 2018
Embedded with Batuk Dal Battalion
Chitwan National Park – a full-day’s drive east from Bardiya National Park – is located in south-central Nepal along the Indian border. It is a World Heritage Site and is Nepal’s third most popular tourist destination, even though visitors are required to adhere to strict regulations. Among other closely monitored rules, tourists are strictly prohibited to walk within the park between sunset and sunrise.
My first morning in Chitwan began in Kasara, the centrally-located headquarters for army security forces. A briefing was held in a building called the Joint Conservation Operation Cell (JCOC). The meeting was led by Major Purshotam Karki, Officiating Commander of Chitwan’s Batuk Dal Battalion.
There is nothing tentative about the man. His discipline is informed by his unflinching sense of purpose. He’s fighting fit and a perfectionist on every level, giving new meaning to the word “punctuality. He enjoys a good laugh. In fact, he has a great sense of humor.
Major Karki takes pride in the JCOC, as well he should. Evidence of the army’s success with digital technology throbs in the JCOC. Applications include a vehicle monitoring system, smart eye, CCTV surveillance, tower-based long-range cameras utilizing fiber optic cable, phones with IP signaling protocols, and radio collars (with VHF radio sets) for tracking endangered species. The army has introduced camera traps, used to capture images of wildlife with as little human interference as possible. (The cameras, interspersed throughout the jungle, are remotely activated with motion sensors.) Batuk Dal Battalion also operates a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones.
Particularly worth noting is the army’s Real Time Patrol System, which implements Near-field Communication protocols. In layman terms, the Real Time Patrol System enables two electronic devices – computers at the JCOC and the mobile phones of the jungle patrols – to link. The result is around-the-clock tracking of troops throughout the large reserve. Red pin-point lights blink on the computer-screen map indicating the exact locations of all troops in real time. This tracking system is invaluable, given the fact that the army conducts more than 170 patrols daily through a subtropical riverine terrain of almost unimaginable biological and botanical diversity.
Three extensive river systems – Narayani, Rapti and Reu – flow through the park. Its forests, which constitute 70% of the reserve, are primarily populated by sal, interspersed with khair (of the Acacia family), red silk cotton, sheesham (Indian rosewood) and other species unfamiliar to the Western eye. Natural pastures are also interspersed throughout the river floodplains with over 50 varieties of grasses, including the phenomenal elephant grass, which grows up to 20 feet in height.
Jungle, water, grassland: This is the backdrop for a lavish variety of zoological species, some of which are found nowhere else in the world: 68 mammals including One-Horned Rhinoceros, Royal Bengal Tiger and Asian Elephant; 49 reptiles – from pythons and cobras and other poisonous snakes to two rare crocodile varieties, marsh muggers and gharials; 120 types of fish; 576 types of birds, 22 of which are critically endangered; and 150 types of butterflies.
Chitwan has the distinction of being Nepal’s major habitat for Bengal Tigers. The latest count is 120.
But I hadn’t come to Chitwan to study tigers. I wanted to focus on the park’s Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros. Chitwan has the second largest population of one-horned rhinos in the world.
Rhinos, the Real Unicorns? A Death Sentence
Once widespread across the entire northern swath of the Indian sub-continent, the One-Horned Rhino population plummeted in the 1900s. Their numbers dwindled due to overhunting for sport, destruction of their habitat, and the increase in poaching. By the end of the 20th century, fewer than 200 Greater One-Horned Rhinos remained extant in Nepal.
The manner in which a poached rhino dies is barbaric. Since the poacher’s interest is primarily in the rhino’s horn and getting away from the scene of the crime as quickly and silently as possible, he often foregoes shooting the rhino, but rather hacks off the horn while the animal is still alive, leaving the rhino to slowly bleed to death.
Poaching syndicates can sell nearly all parts of the rhino as folk medicine, however. Dried tongue “cures” children with speech impediments. “Urine” cures asthma. Placed under an expectant mother’s pillow, rhino tail “allays labor pain”. Powdered rhino horn “reduces” fever and “stops” convulsions. The make-believe list goes on and on. All of these traditional remedies are void of applied-science corroboration but try telling that to racketeers making fortunes in China, other southeast Asian countries, and even in the Arabian Peninsula.
According to some estimates, nearly 40% of rhino horn is sold to Yemen, used for the handles of the men’ jambiyas, (short, curved daggers tucked into the front of their robes). In Yemen society, hilts carved from rhino horn connote a man’s wealth and presuppose his superior masculinity.
The newest country attracted to the fictional powers attributed to rhino horn – again, the nouveau riche phenomenon – is Viet Nam. According to The Atlantic, powdered rhino horn has become “the alcoholic drink of Vietnamese millionaires” promoted on the groundless belief that it cures cancer and is a panacea for overtaxed livers. A horn goes for around $300,000 in Viet Nam, giving it a cult-like luxury-item status. Among late-night club-goers, it’s “seen as a cocaine-like party drug.”
For the record, rhino horn is made up of keratin, a protein found in human hair and fingernails. The Vietnamese might as well sweep up barbershop clippings, put them in a blender, add booze, hit PUREE and gulp down the concoction. The resultant effect – nothing from the keratin, inebriation from the alcohol – will perfectly duplicate the drinking of a rhino-horn cocktail, replete with sky-bars, with two notable differences: The barbershop version is 1) dirt cheap and 2) doesn’t entail the slaughter of magnificent beasts.
Did Disney animations ever portray unicorns with as many make-believe properties as the ones attributed to One-Horned Rhinos? There’s a popular meme on the internet: “Unicorns are real. They’re just fat and grey and we call them rhinos.” The author of that joke may be closer to the truth than she or he realizes. The blurring of identity may be the source of the rhino’s vulnerability.
Did the fairy-tale belief in unicorns spring from bona fide ancestors of 21st-century rhinos? The Siberian Rhinoceros, (Elasmotherium sibiricum) – thought to have become extinct 300,000 years ago – was dramatically reevaluated in 2016, when paleontologists discovered partial remains in present-day Kazakhstan. Radiocarbon dating of the skull fossil adduced that it was alive as recently as 29,000 years ago. Although the discovery doesn’t pretend to suggest that the species was the source of the unicorn myth, it does remind prehistorians that one-horned rhinos lived at the same time as early humans, thereby providing a memory bank for future fables, believed to be popularized and promulgated during the classical Greek period. Even before that, the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon is adorned by what was thought by many as a unicorn.
Unicorn myth may be the rhino’s worst enemy. Obviously, it’s beyond Nepal Army’s purview to change the fads of foreign millionaires or eradicate universally treasured fairytales. What the army can do – what it is doing – is to adhere to a no-nonsense four-pronged operation: Protect the rhinos’ natural habitat, bring military might to the conservations’ programs, thwart poachers, and raise awareness within local buffer zone communities.
This strategy, as Major Karki proved in his briefing, has paid off. From less than 200 rhinos in Nepal in 2000, the count has risen to an astounding 645 in 2018, 605 of which reside in Chitwan National Park. Even more notable is the fact that the army has been able to celebrate Zero Poaching in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2018. How this has come about is one of Asia’s greatest success stories in anti-poaching crusades.
To be continued...
For PART ONE LINK HERE
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