HUFFINGTON POST
23 May 2012
Katy Daigle

NEW DELHI — A state in western India has declared war on animal poaching by sanctioning its forest guards to shoot hunters on sight in an effort to curb rampant attacks against tigers and other wildlife.

The government in Maharashtra says injuring or killing suspected poachers will no longer be considered a crime.

Forest guards should not be "booked for human rights violations when they have taken action against poachers," Maharashtra Forest Minister Patangrao Kadam said Tuesday. The state also will send more rangers and jeeps into the forest, and will offer secret payments to informers who give tips about poachers and animal smugglers, he said.

The threat against poachers may be only bluster. No tiger poachers have ever been shot in Maharashtra before, though cases of shooting illegal loggers and fishermen have led to charges against forest guards, according to the state's chief wildlife warden, S.W.H. Naqvi.

But the threat could act as a significant deterrent to wildlife criminals, conservationists said. A similar measure allowing guards to fire on poachers in Assam has helped the northeast state's population of endangered one-horned rhinos recover.

"These poachers have lost all fear. They just go in and poach what they want because they know the risks are low," said Divyabhanusinh Chavda, who heads the World Wildlife Fund in India and is a key member of the National Wildlife Board, which advises the prime minister. In many of India's reserves, guards are armed with little more than sticks.

India faces intense international scrutiny over its tiger conservation, as the country holds half of the world's estimated 3,200 tigers in dozens of wildlife reserves set up since the 1970s, when hunting was banned.

Illegal poaching remains a stubborn and serious threat, with tiger parts in particular fetching high prices on the black market thanks to demand driven by traditional Chinese medicine practitioners.

According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India, 14 tigers have been killed by poachers in India so far this year – one more than in all of 2011. The tiger is considered endangered, with its habitat range shrinking more than 50 percent in the last quarter-century while its numbers declined from the 5,000-7,000 estimated in the 1990s, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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