Rare rhinos victims of Nepal's instability

A sudden rise in the poaching of one-horned rhinos in Nepal has officials — including army and police — scrambling to come up with a plan to protect the endangered animals.

Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and Forest Minister Deepak Bohara summoned conservation officials and the chiefs of police and army on Sunday, ordering them to come up with a strategy.

Eight rhinos have been killed in less than a month, according to the Times of India, which reported that dozens of school children attended a gathering in Kathmandu on Sunday, bearing placards demanding action against poachers. Twenty-eight rhinos have been killed in the past 11 months.

The animals are poached for their horn which is believed to have medicinal value and is coveted as an ornamental dagger handle. 

At their most critical point, there were only 200 left in the wild. Stronger and better-enforced conservation laws over the last few years have helped increase their numbers to just under 500 in Nepal's tall grasslands and its forests in the Himalayan foothills. Another 2,000 live in the adjacent jungles of India.

The one-horned rhinos — also known as Indian rhinos — are officially protected and Nepal's forests are supposed to be conservation areas. But the security forces in charge of guarding them have been largely redeployed to urban areas to deal with the current political instability.

Maoist leaders have been organizing protests across Nepal for months to push the government to resign. The Maoists — who ended their bloody insurgency in 2006 and joined the political process — won the country's most recent elections, but a dispute split their coalition, forcing their government to disband and ushering in the current leaders.

"Stopping the poaching is a major challenge for us. There is always an increase in poaching of wildlife in the conservation area when there is political problems," said Department of Forest and Wildlife Conservation official Megh Bahadur Pandey.

The Indian rhino is the second-largest of five living species, about three times the size of a Sumatran at up to 2,700 kilograms, standing 1.8 metres tall and 3.7 metres long.