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Gir NP

  • MP seeks Asiatic lions from zoos

    In a desperate move, Madhya Pradesh government has written to all the zoos in the country to spare Asiatic lions for Kuno-Palpur National Park, where lions from Gir were to be shifted. Senior officials of Gujarat forest department revealed that they had received a letter asking for lions from any of the zoos here, especially from Sakarbaugh Zoo in Junagadh where lions are brought for treatment. Officials said that after Gujarat Government said no, MP government has decided to acquire at least six lions from different zoos in the country.

  • Impact of religious tourism on Gir National Park

    Many protected area managers are encountering difficulties balancing the demands of conservation and visitors. An essential component of sound management planning for these areas is objective data on visitor use impacts and needs. Gir National Park attracgts a large number of visitors, both pilgrims and tourists. What matters is not the large number of visitors, but the type of visitors, the pattern of resource use and the quality of management to achieve compatibility between activities undertaken by the visitors and the protected area objectives.

  • Gir show: Sell cattle as bait, claim damages

    Sasan: Call it the lion's share, twice over. For every

  • Lions feasting in Gir. You are invited!

    The setting sun has painted the sky a bright red. But, for a group of wide-eyed tourists, it's a different red that's attracting their attention. A bloodied buffalo is being torn apart by two lions while two cubs join in. This is right in the middle of the lion country, just 25 km from Sasan, close to the core of Gir lion sanctuary that is the last refuge of the endangered Asiatic lions.

  • Injured lion found near Dhari, treated

    An injured lion, sighted in the Hadada region, was captured and given immediate medical attention by forest rangers on Tuesday evening. The 11-year-old male feline had developed maggots in an injury and was treated by vets of Jasdhar animal health centre on the spot and later shifted to the centre for observation.

  • Another threat facing lions: Vacant DCF post

    Gir maybe the last abode of the Asiatic lion, but the authorities couldn't care less.

  • Asiatic lions make Mitiyala their new home

    The Asiatic lions moving out of the Gir sanctuary have made Mitiyala, Bhavnagar and Amreli as their permanent home.

  • Trust seeks funds to cap Gir wells

    Wildlife Conservation Trust of Rajkot has made a fresh appeal to corporates to help them fund their effort to construct parapet walls around open wells in the Gir area so that lions don't fall into

  • 15 lions killed in 2 years: Govt

    Giving details on the big cat, the Gujarat government on Friday admitted that as many as 15 lions were killed over the last two years in Gujarat. Of these, six were killed in Gir forests alone.

  • Saving the tiger

    PM must keep his pledge by Lt Gen (retd) Baljit Singh Because it is there'! That was the pithy response of George Mallory during a fund-raising lecture in Cambridge in 1924 when one in the audience asked: "Why climb the Everest?' Elaborating further on the interrogative "why' to our quest for preserving the Royal Bengal Tiger species in the wilderness in India, let us not forget that first and foremost the tiger is India's national animal. And therefore it is one of the icons of our nationhood. Now that the Government of India has conceded that we are left with less than 1,200 tigers, the question which begs the answer is: how shall we save the species from imminent extinction? Perhaps we can draw strength by recalling experiences from the last century where certain mammal and bird species were successfully provided a second lease of life, and draw lessions therefrom to mitigate the current tiger crisis facing us. We have the case when in 1903 the eight Asiatic lions in the Gir forest constituted the only surviving pride of lions in the entire world. It was a common practice in colonial India for the rulers of the princely states to host the Viceray over the Christmas week. So the Nawab of Junagadh conceived the idea of tempting Lord Curzon with what would virtually be the last hunt in Asia for a lion trophy. Making departure with protocol, Lord Curzon replied in person to the Nawab. He declined his gracious invitation, inveigled with him to ban lion hunting altogether and protect the Gir forests so that the Asiatic lion may survive to perpetuity. This provides us the finest example where the astute vision of the head of a Government coupled with an unwavering political will saved a mammal species from the very jaws of extinction. Lord Curzon's successors and the Nawabs of Junagadh kept up that resolve so that on India's Independence in 1947 there were about 62 Asiatic lions in the Gir. Today they number more than 300! Moving on to 1972 we arrive at the fateful year when the Arabian Oryx was declared extinct from the wild. And with that we come to the story where philanthropy of a handful petro-dollar rich princes of the UAE has aided the reintroduction of this speices. Starting in the 1980s, in zealously guarded and regularly patrolled selected areas on the Arabian peninsula, where about 800 captively bred Arabian Oryx were released in trickle now and then, a new lease of life was provided to this species. This is a beginning of what may be the only initiative in the reintroduction of a species after total extinction. One crucial factor of success was that in Saudi Arabia alone a mind-boggling 2200 sq miles area for reintroduction was totally fenced-in which, without philanthropy, is simply unthinkable. At this stage, it is essential for me to state emphatically that as of now, unfortunately, there has been very little success with reintroducing hand-reared or captively bred carnivore to the wild. George and Joy Adamson, who left India in the 1940s to settle in S. Africa, tried to release in the wild their hand-reared, orphaned lion cubs. These animals were either not canny enough or were wanting in physical vitality to stand up to their free-ranging members. The attempts failed to establish a precedence. In India, "Billy' Arjun Singh, now an octogenerian, attempted to hand-rear a female tiger cub born in and purchased from the London zoo, with the idea of ultimately releasing it in the Dudhwa tiger reserve. He fared better than the Adamsons in as much that Harriet did made with a free-ranging tiger, littered in the wild but brought the week-old cubs back, one by one to a room in Tiger Haven, Billy's home on the fringes of Dudhwa! The story beyond is marred in controversy whether Harriet and her progency perished through deliberately poisoned baits by the Forest Department or at the hands of poachers? A similar attempt by Billy with a leopard cub (Prince) also remained an inconclusive venture. Antagonists of the tiger conservation idea will be quick to point out that in Texas there as nearly 3,000 tigers (Royal Bengal and Sumatran species) living in captivity inside large enclosures on the ranches of the rich Americans. But this in no way can be a living gene pool for us to reintroduce them in our wilds for two basic imponderables. First, there are no reports yet of their having littered in capivity in Texas. If they do and by the time we hand-rear them in India, they may meet the same fate as Harriet's progeny. Worse, by then their natural prey base in India's wilds would have diminished forcing them to become cattle or man eaters. And the same disadvantage will be faced even if we were to purchase adults from this lot in Texas and reintroduce them after the extirpation of the species from its habitat. We must save en block the last 1,000-odd surviving tigers and their habitat and create conditions for the numbers to multiply to about 5,000 animals or else India and the world would lose the tiger species from the wild

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