BENGALURU: Two adult tuskers were shot dead and their tusks were poached by an unidentified gang in the Male Mahadeshwara Hills Wildlife Sanctuary in Chamarajnagar district. This is the first such poaching case in the forest located close to Tamil Nadu border since forest brigand Veerappan died.
A forest patrolling party, following a stench, stumbled upon the rotting carcasses of the elephants on Monday morning. Both the tuskers had their foreheads removed for the tusks and lay about half-a-kilometre from the Palar river.
Mr Ravi Ralph, Chief Wildlife Warden, who visited M.M. Hills on Monday evening, said that a probe will be ordered to catch the people involved in the incident. “The postmortem will be conducted on Tuesday morning. The elephants seem to have been shot from a close range,” the officer said.
The forest officials at M.M. Hills said that the method used to remove tusks shows that the shooters were professionals. “In most elephant poaching cases, the tusks are cut with saws as the gangs don’t have much time after they shoot the elephant. But here, the poachers have cut open the skulls from the forehead, which was what Veerappan’s gang did during 1980-90,” said an official.The officials said that though the carcasses were discovered after a week, they have gathered clues about the gang members involved.
“There are a few eyewitnesses from villages near M.M. Hills Sanctuary and we are trying to investigate along these lines. We are also collecting information from the cattle grazers who may have possibly seen gang members moving about with arms. We are checking the camera trap images, laid to record the movement of carnivores in the sanctuary, to ascertain if there are any human footprints in the images. In 2014, three poachers were arrested in M.M. Hills after their pictures by camera trap equipment,” the official said.
