“I can’t talk now, I’m in hospital,” Ram Kumar Aryal says when he picks up the phone. “Someone has been attacked by one of the rhinos.” Every few months, Aryal – who is one of the architects of Nepal’s celebrated rhino conservation programme – ends up in one of the hospitals around Chitwan national park to respond to a rhino attack. This time, three women had been injured earlier that afternoon by a female rhino outside Laukhani village in the park’s buffer zone. The hospital had bandaged up their fractured legs and ribs and treated the bites on their hips and knees. “Normally rhinos are vegetarian, but they use their incisors for attacks,” says Aryal. Those incisors can grow to three inches long. Incidents like this are not unusual. In the past six months, eight people have been killed by rhinos in the Chitwan national park buffer zone – a 750 sq km (290 sq miles) area surrounding the park, which is home to 45,000 households. In towns here, rhinos can often be seen wandering the streets, sauntering past restaurants, bars and motorbike stands, snoozing on hotel lawns and grazing in people’s back gardens. Residents are curious but wary of them. The women survived by jumping inside a hollowed out tree, says Aryal, who used to work for the semi-governmental organisation the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC). Two years ago, Aryal’s uncle was found dead after he had gone out looking for vegetables in the jungle. They found rhino bite marks on his body and prints nearby. “It is difficult but we have to accept it, what can we do? It is a species we need to protect,” says Aryal. “We still respect rhinos. This is the land of rhino, with human beings in.” When the park was created in 1973 there were 100 greater one-horned rhinos. Now there are almost 700 in Chitwan, 90% of Nepal’s total. The human population is also growing, with 300,000 people living in the buffer zone, which has made it a hotspot for human wildlife conflict. It is not just rhinos – the park’s growing population of elephants, tigers and sloth bears have also killed humans. The greater one-horned rhino is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and was once close to extinction. Its population recovery is considered one of Asia’s great conservation success stories, thanks to strict protection in Nepal and India. Wild rhinos typically pass through villages on their way to cropland on the other side, but some tamer rhinos are stationed more permanently in the villages. These resident rhinos (often rescue animals) generally ignore people. One, named Meghauli, was rescued from a flood when he was two or three and cared for by NTNC staff. “He was already the size of a horse,” says Aryal. When it was time to go back into the forest, Meghauli didn’t want to go – he was getting picked on by bigger males. “When his incisors – or teeth – are bigger he will go into the jungle. They will be his main instrument for fighting,” says Aryal. “Of course, people will miss him when he goes into the forest.” Other tame rhinos include Pushpa and Anjali, who were abandoned by their mothers and raised by park authorities. Local people recognise them and know their temperaments, but two months ago, someone mistook a wild rhino for one of the adopted ones and was killed. Rabin KC, a conservationist from NTNC who grew up in the village, says: “The domesticated rhinos haven’t killed anyone in Sauraha. But it could happen – at the end of the day, they are wild. If you pull their tail they might attack.” Despite this, he says local people are fond of them. “People are not that anxious about the orphan rhinos in Sauraha. They are earning good money from them, so they are welcoming them, by feeding them and giving them buckets of water.” The village is popular with tourists visiting Chitwan national park, which attracted 185,000 foreign visitors in 2019. Within Sauraha village there is a Rhino Lodge and Hotel, a Hotel Rhino Land, and Rhino Residency Resort. “They may not see the rhino in the park, but they can see them in the streets,” says KC. “Locals are earning a good amount of foreign currency and welcoming a lot of tourists. Sometimes, people are making TikTok videos of the rhinos.” Birendra Mahato, founder chair of the Tharu Cultural Museum and Research Center, who lives in Sauraha, says he personally knows more than 20 people who have been killed by rhinos. His parents – who are farmers – used to live inside what is now the national park, but were removed from the land into Sauraha village when the park was designated in 1973. “The conflict with rhinos mostly impacts poorer, Indigenous people, who have no land. Those who are poor need to go to the park to get fuel or grass, and at the same time they are attacked,” he says. Those living closer to the national park, who are most dependent on its resources, have the most negative attitudes towards rhinos, research suggests. Yet out of 200 local people surveyed, only two said they did not care about rhino conservation. “Despite their fear and the amount of crop damage caused by the rhino, people still have a positive attitude towards the rhino conservation,” the study found. Mahato says government policies need to provide more support to those most affected. “People don’t mind rhinos coming into the villages, but they mind when they eat their crops and they get no compensation,” he says. Sometimes they do get compensation, but it is slow, and often only amounts to 20% of the total damage. If a human is killed by a large predator, the family gets one million Nepali rupees (£5,500). Nepal’s rhino conservation work has been hailed as a great success, but some people living alongside these animals are paying the highest price. “You cannot compensate a life with money,” says KC. Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
Author: Photographs by Paul Hilton and words by Phoebe Weston