ALARM BELLS IN PANNA

BIG CAT POACHING

- Rahul Noronha

In mid-August, the decomposed body of a tiger, P-123, washed up on the banks of the Ken river in the Panna National Park, the fifth tiger death in the reserve in the past eight months. The park management initially claimed P-123 had succumbed to injuries sustained in a territorial fight with another tiger, P-431. One of the staff had witnessed it, they said. It was the autopsy report, which came out a month later, that raised alarm in the state’s wildlife establishment and beyond.

The tiger’s claws were missing, as were his head and private parts—a sure sign of poaching. A week later, the Special Tiger Strike Force (STSF)—the state’s dedicated anti-poaching unit— unearthed an organised poaching ring feeding off the Panna park.

For a park that had lost all its tigers to poaching in 2008, losing a tenth of the adult population and the presence of an organised poaching gang in its vicinity are deeply troubling signs. On September 17, the STSF arrested three people in Jabalpur and recovered leopard skin and spotted deerskin. One of the accused, Jitendra Tiwari, a resident of Brijpur in Panna, led the team to more recoveries in his hometown. Four days later, two more leopard and spotted deer hides were recovered. Meanwhile, two leopard poaching cases were reported in the past few months. Tiwari’s arrest wasn’t a regulation poaching case. The STSF found that Tiwari and his associates were running an organised poaching syndicate and were, in fact, the back-end of operations that helped legitimise illegally sourced wildlife trophies. The STSF, however, did not recover any of the missing tiger parts, of P-123 or any others.