UP police seize 3 tonnes of deer antlers

UP police seize 3 tonnes of deer antlers
AJAY SURI

NEW DELHI, DEC 31: In perhaps the biggest strike on Indian wildlife so far, poachers in Uttar Pradesh killed enough deer to collect a whopping three tonne of antlers. The banned articles telltale proof of the killers' wantonness were seized from Najibabad by the local police recently and so far one person has been arrested.

If undetected, the consignment would have eventually landed in Europe and other countries and been converted to pistol and cutlery handles, expensive buttons and other luxury items for the rich and famous.

It is feared that the poachers wiped out over 1,000 deer to procure these antlers. Najibabad, almost equidistant from the Corbett and Rajaji national parks, is also not too far from the famed Dudhwa national park. In all likelihood, experts feel, the deer were killed from these three places.The Union Environment Ministry has reportedly been informed of the seizure and efforts are on to probe how a massacre of this scale went unnoticed in an area close to the heart of India'swildlife in north India.

When the police swooped on the accused Mohammed Farooq, a van gujjar, they came across the antlers stacked in 52 gunny bags in his house. Farooq's interrogation is continuing, but so far he has not given any information. Experts feel that the trail leads clearly to the well-connected caucus of exporters in southern and western States, notably Karnataka and Maharashtra. This group has been persistently trying with the Environment Ministry to lift the ban on antlers' export, but so far without success.

The seizure, however, shows that the antlers' trade is flourishing unchecked under the very nose of the law, says Ashok Kumar, president of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). His forum, incidentally, is at the forefront of the battle against the antler trade and recently approached the Supreme Court in this connection.

So far the police have opened 12 of the gunny bags and all the antlers pulled out are attached with skull pieces clearly showing that the animals werekilled. In normal circumstances, the deer shed the antlers periodically but even picking these from forests is prohibited.

A detailed scientific paper prepared by WPSI and recently submitted to the Environment Ministry show the all-important role of shed antlers in forests.Antlers are calcium rich and used by most of the animals in the jungle. They even help sustain a lot of smaller animals like porcupines and rodents. But the most important function of a live deer is to support the prey base for tiger and other large carnivores.

In this particular case, it is argued, killing so many of them in one go is bound to disturb the fragile food chain linked inextricably with the ecological balance of the sub-Himalayan Terai region of Uttar Pradesh.The last major seizure of antlers was made from Gaya in Bihar seven years ago when the authorities stumbled across 900 kg of them. In 1996, 500 kg of antlers were recovered from Nainital. The next year 770 kg were recovered from the same state in two separateseizures.

But none not even forest officials was prepared for a seizure of this dimension from Najibabad.

The Central Government's ban on the antler trade and export came into effect from 1998, as a result of hectic lobbying by wildlife groups.

Wildlife observers lament that while so much noise is being made about chiru, the endangered Tibetan antelope whose skin ends up as shahtoosh shawls, the Indian deer is left at the mercy of trigger-happy poachers working for traders with deep pockets and well-oiled political connections.