Wildbuzz | No limits to human barbarity
Poachers well versed with the activities and habits of wild species booby-trap fields and game trails at night with these low-intensity IEDs
A female Sambar, a potential mother, fell prey to the most horrific of poaching practises on Friday afternoon. Her jaw and face were blown up after she innocently bit into a crude improvised explosive device (IED) concealed in an ‘atta’ (wheat flour) ball laced with jaggery and grains in the jungle adjoining the National Fertilisers Ltd. (NFL) complex in Nangal, Punjab. Its plight was such that no medical assistance could have saved it. A gunshot in the head would have been a quick, merciful act.
Following the blast, the bleeding female was set upon by three dogs, including a Pitbull, that bit it viciously and hung onto the deer as she ran helter-skelter in panic and catastrophic pain. An empathetic local, Tilak Raj, was able to scare off the dogs but the deer died soon after in the NFL hospital premises.
Wildlife conservationist of the NGO, Jagriti, Parbhat Bhatti, had rushed to the spot. “This poaching is common and unchecked in the Nangal jungles. Poachers use easily available chemicals like potash to prepare crude bombs. Two suspects have been rounded up for questioning by wildlife officials,” Bhatti told this writer.
The Sambar has been accorded the highest protection by the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, under Schedule I and at par with tigers, lions, leopards and elephants. “I have constituted a team to investigate the Nangal incident,’’ Chief Wildlife Warden Basanta Rajkumar told this writer.
Poachers well versed with the activities and habits of wild species booby-trap fields and game trails at night with these low-intensity IEDs. Wild boars are the common victims of the savagery though Sambars, Barking deer, jackals, dogs and cattle fall prey, too. Wounded animals, which stagger off from the bomb explosion in shock and pain after falling for the baited bombs, are traced and hounded by dogs. The bombs are sometimes ingested and go off in the animal’s stomach causing ripping wounds, leaving the creature to writhe and die, isolated in an indifferent world.
The Forests and Wildlife Preservation department has not succeeded in checking this barbaric poaching despite its prevalence over many years.
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