Plenty of horns The settlements where rhinoceros roam the streets

I can't talk now, I'm in hospital," Ram Kumar Aryal said when he picked up the phone.

- Phoebe Weston

“Someone has been attacked by one of the rhinos.” Every few months, Aryal - one of the architects of Nepal's celebrated rhino conservation programme - ends up in one of the hospitals around Chitwan National Park to respond to a rhinoceros attack. This time, three women had been injured earlier that afternoon by a female rhino outside Laukhani village in the park’s buffer zone.

The hospital had bandaged up their fractured legs and ribs, and treated the bites on their hips and knees.

“Normally rhinos are vegetarian, but they use their incisors for attacks,” said Aryal. Those incisors can grow to around 7cm long.

Incidents like this are not unusual. In the past six months, eight people have been killed by rhinos in the Chitwan national park buffer zone - a 750 sq km area surrounding the park, which is home to 45,000 households.

In towns here, rhinos can often be seen wandering the streets, sauntering past restaurants, bars and motorbike stands, snoozing on hotel lawns and grazing in people’s back gardens. Residents are curious but wary of them.

The women survived because they were quick-thinking and jumped inside a hollowed-out tree, says Aryal, who used to work for the semi-governmental National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC). Two years ago, Aryal’s uncle was found dead after he had gone out looking for vegetables in the jungle. They found rhino bite marks on his body and prints nearby. “It is difficult but we have to accept it. What can we do? It is a species we need to protect,” said Aryal. “We still respect rhinos. This is the land of rhino, with human beings in.”