Kaziranga National Park

Officially, rangers are supposed to engage with anyone they see in the park, asking who they are and warning them that they’re armed. They are meant to arrest them, too, so they can be questioned and intelligence gathered on poaching networks, but a BBC investigation by Justin Rowlatt in 2017 suggested that informally, rangers are told simply to shoot.

The figures would seem to bear this out. While the park authorities maintain that their rangers are engaged in shoot-outs with poachers, only six park rangers have been killed in the last 20 years, while more than 100 people were shot by park rangers in the same period.

As a direct consequence – and perhaps inevitably – there are cases of local people being shot by accident. One young man went to retrieve the family’s cows that had strayed into the park. Rangers shouted for him to identify himself, but he had learning difficulties which prevented him responding. He was shot dead. A seven-year-old boy was mistakenly shot by rangers, and the wounds to his right calf have left him unable to walk unaided. In this instance, the park paid for medical treatment and offered compensation, but this is rare.

The government has granted the rangers in Kaziranga considerable protection against prosecution if they do shoot and kill anyone in the park. In addition, any local, innocent victims of the rangers typically lack the finance or expertise to bring a prosecution. The rights of local people, whether directly involved in poaching or simply caught in the crossfire, seem not to be of concern to the park authorities, and traditional ways of life, run in peaceful coexistence with the park territory and its wildlife for years, are being eroded.

This issue may not even remain local to Kaziranga. UK charity Survival International says there are plans to roll out this shoot-on-sight anti-poaching policy across India’s national parks. Potentially good news for the struggling tiger populations in the country, but much more problematic for people living right on the borders of reserves and parks in this crowded country.

There’s no question that poaching is the reason some of our best loved species are now desperately endangered. A hardline approach can produce results, but it risks being counter-productive, by alienating the very local people who can provide vital intelligence about the wider poaching operations at work in a region.

In Chitwan and Bardiya National Parks in Nepal, for instance, community outreach has been a huge part of the anti-poaching strategy and the park authorities are eager to minimise any wildlife-human conflict that could jeopardise conservation efforts. Park authorities will capture ‘rogue’ tigers and other animals that are attacking local people or threatening livelihoods through crop predation, as any detrimental wildlife behaviour can alienate local people and cause conservation initiatives to fail.

Kaziranga has adopted an extreme and unnuanced approach to poaching, but it serves to illustrate one of 21st century conservation’s conundrum: how do you square the need to protect endangered species with upholding the rights of people who live in and around national parks?