Rhinoceros — India, Asia & Southeast Asia

Major threats today facing Indian, Sumatran and Javan rhinos are poaching, loss of habitat due to logging of hardwood and agricultural conversion and invasive species. Visit World Wildlife Fund, Save The Rhino, South Asian Wildlife Enforcement Network, and International Rhino Foundation for more information and tips on what you can do to help.

“The International Rhino Foundation, in association with Yayasan Badak Indonesia and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry, has been exploring the idea of transferring some animals to a much nearer reserve, in the Honje Mountains of West Java. This would involve not moving the animals but restoring rhino habitat in the area between the Honje Mountains and Ujung Kulon in the hope that rhinos will cross to their new homes on their own.”

“The Javan rhino exists in a single population in Ujung Kulon peninsular, western Java, Indonesia. Here the rhino population has recovered quite well from fewer than 30 individuals in 1967 to between 50 and 60 in 1980. Since then the population has been stagnant or even slowly declining. The 2012 estimate is between 37 and 44 animals.”

“The greater one-horned rhino [also known as the Indian rhino) is one of the two greatest success stories in rhino conservation (the other one being the southern white rhino in South Africa). With strict protection from Indian and Nepalese wildlife authorities, greater one-horned rhino numbers have recovered from fewer than 200 earlier in the 20th century to as many as 3,333 today."

It is the most endangered of all rhinoceros species because of its rapid rate of decline, its population decreased more than 50% over the last 20 years.“The biggest threats for Sumatran rhinos is poaching. Sumatran rhinos are poached for their horn, and the loss of their habitat occurs for human agricultural development. The horn is used in Asia as a medicine for fever and pain, and trade in rhino horn between Borneo and other source areas in SE Asia and China has been reported since before more than 2,000 years ago."

"Since 1986, Nepal has actively pursued a policy of relocating rhinoceros from this park [Chitwan National Park] to another some five hours away... Since the program started, over sixty rhinos have been successfully moved from their last refuge in Chitwan to Bardia [National Park]. Setting up new populations will help all the rhinos in Nepal by creating new bloodlines and new gene pools. But it is a difficult and potentially dangerous undertaking."

The World Conservation Union established the Asian Rhino Specialist Group in the late 1970s in response to declining populations of Sumatran rhinos. "Management actions recommended by this group, and others that were subsequently created (e.g. the Sumatran Rhino Trust), included field research, surveys and monitoring, setting aside of protected reserves where poaching is prevented, control of trade in rhino horn, and a captive breeding and reintroduction program."

"The population in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley crashed... from an estimated 1,000 animals before 1950 to only about 100 by the mid-1960s. People had flooded into the region following successful malaria-eradication programs in the late 1950s, taking over land once occupied by rhinos. Among the immigrants were experienced hunters, and poaching increased as rhinoceros habitat decreased. By 1968 there were only some 95 rhinos in the whole of Nepal.”

The Smaller One-horned Rhinoceros was once believed to range from Bengal and Assam through Burma and the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra... In earlier works on Burma, it is mentioned as having been once abundant in the forested banks of large rivers in the district of Tenasserim. Recent attempts to discover whether this rhinoceros still exists in Burma have failed and it is doubted where there are more than a half dozen specimens and it is doubtful whether these will survive without adequate measures for their protection... As far as can be ascertained its range is now limited to the Malay Peninsula and Java where a few still exist under protection."

“By the time the first naturalists ventured into the Southeast Asian forests, the Javan rhino was already very rare... The Javan rhino showed the most dramatic decline of all three Asian rhino species, and by about 1930 the Javan rhinos was restricted to Ujung Kulon, a small peninsula on the westernmost tip of Java and a few small isolated populations in Vietnam and possible Laos and Cambodia.”

"The common single horned rhinoceros is very abundant. Though often seen on the uninhabited banks of large rivers at the Tenasserim they are fond of ranging the mountains, and I have frequently met with their wallowing places on the banks of mountain streams two or three thousand feet above the plains."

Once found across the entire northern part of the Indian sub-continent, rhino populations were severely depleted as they were hunted for sport and killed as agricultural pests. The Maharajah of Cooch Bihar alone killed 207 rhinos between 1871 and 1907. This pushed the species very close to extinction in the early 20th century and by 1975 there were only 600 individuals surviving in the wild.