Rehab Comes Home for Kaziranga Animals

Despite the devastation, there was a blue-sky feel about the national park. Forest guards, conservationists and officers all knew that the toll could have been much higher had it not been for Vivek Menon and Dr Rathin Barman, who were in the park to set up the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC). They stepped in to rescue and treat the stranded animals; many of them have since returned to their natural habitat.

This is just one positive impact of the CWRC. ‘‘The Centre will bring about a radical change in the very concept of rehabilitation and conservation,’’ says Menon, director of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), under whose initiative the Rs 22-lakh CWRC — the first of its kind in Asia — opened here on August 28. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which supports the WTI, has fitted out the Centre with animalcare equipment very different from that used by regular vets.

During visits over 10 years, Menon was witness to members of various endangered species dying simply because no immediate medical care was available in the 480 sq km park. ‘‘So far, injured animals could only be sent to the Assam State zoo in Guwahati. The large numbers, especially of elephant and rhino calves, put immense pressure on the zoo facilities. The CWRC will not only rescue animals but treat them and look after them till they are ready to go back into the wild,’’ says Menon.

According to Park director N K Vasu, the Centre will be focusing on all animals in distress, whether they are rescued from poachers, or otherwise injured, orphaned and abandoned. Right now, for instance, Dr Barman and his team are looking after a rhino calf and a baby buffalo, both of which were abandoned when their mothers fled to escape the rising floodwaters. “Normally, a baby rhino or a baby buffalo will have only mother’s milk. In their absence, we have to feed them cow milk and powder milk, supplemented with nutrients,’’ says Dr Barman.

The rehabilitation centre has five mobile wildlife clinics attached to it; four are in the Park, while the fifth is earmarked for Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal. ‘‘We are focusing on Assam and Arunachal Pradesh because they comprise one of India’s two world-level mega bio-diversity hotspots,’’ says Kelvin Alie, coordinator of the wildlife project of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.