Zero Tolerance for Wildlife Crime There is very much a zero-tolerance attitude to wildlife crime, whereby justice is often swift and harsh, notes John Sellar, an antismuggling, fraud, and organized crime consultant and former CITES enforcement chief. Nepals forest law empowers district forest officers and chief wildlife wardens to deal with offenders and impose prison sentences of up to 14 or 15 years, according to Sellar. Whilst this scenario might seem at odds with other judicial systems, Sellar says, probably its greatest advantage is that it means that any poacher who is caught can expect to be dealt with much quicker than in other countries suffering high levels of poaching, where court systems regularly have lengthy backlogs and where, currently, insufficient deterrence is present. Thanks to Nepals efforts, its current estimated population of tigers in national parks increased from 121 in 2009 to 198 in 2013, a promising uptick for a species thats in desperate trouble globally. A 2011 census of Nepals greater one-horned rhinos showed an estimated population of 534, up 20 percent from 425 in 2008, with more than 500 of them in Chitwan National Park. The Nepalese army patrols the national parks to ensure their protection. But poaching increased during the Maoist insurgency from 1996 to 2006, when soldiers were redeployed and the number of army monitoring posts in and around the park fell from 30 to 7. As a result, Chitwans rhino population reportedly fell from 612 rhinos in 2000 to some 380 in 2006, when a peace accord was signed. Today, according to BBC reports, at least a thousand Nepalese soldiers patrol Chitwan from more than 40 posts.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 08:40:16 +0000