This is one park you wouldn’t want to get on the staff’s bad side.
Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India, has done an incredible job at protecting the more than 2,400 Indian one-horned rhinoceroses. As successful as they’ve been in protecting and helping this species – which was once reduced to only a handful left – their methods have come under fire, so to speak.
That’s because in order to protect the rhino population, the park, which holds 75% of the worlds horned rhinos, allows its workers to kill any poachers who come after the animals.
If that sounds extreme, it’s because it is. The park has killed 50 poachers so far and in 2015, the park killed more poachers than poachers killed rhinos. That may just sound like they’re doing they job, but this method leaves an insane amount of room for error. How could they possibly know if some of the people they’ve killed were innocent or not? In short, they couldn’t.
The rhino horn trade is still a major issue that threatens the lives of any living rhino. At $60 a gram, the horn of a rhino is worth much more than gold.
Rhinos obviously need protection, but protecting them in this way is insane, especially since a worker can kill a ‘poacher’ and not suffer any consequences.
