2 months ago
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GUWAHATI
Punjab, 1 of India’s slightest forested States, is challenging the cognition that wildlife crimes are confined to dense jungles and protected areas.
A caller survey has identified emerging wildlife transgression hotspots successful the agrarian State, whose wood screen is little than 3.6% of its geographical country of 50,362 sqkm. The findings underline however amerciable hunting, trafficking, and commercialized networks accommodate to a human-dominated scenery by exploiting gaps successful monitoring and enforcement.
Tarn Taran-based national idiosyncratic Navdeep Sood and Rohan Kumar of Lovely Professional University successful Phagwara are the authors of the study, published successful the latest contented of the Journal of Threatened Taxa.
Their survey documents 32 incidents of wildlife transgression successful Punjab betwixt 2019 and 2024, affecting thousands of animals, galore endangered. Apart from chaotic boars, leopards, tigers, sambars, freshwater turtles, and Tibetan antelopes, the trafficked animals see marine species.
The researchers pass that these incidents, based connected reported wildlife crimes, correspond the extremity of the iceberg. The researchers said wildlife transgression successful Punjab is not randomly distributed but highly concentrated. Using spatial analysis, they recovered that 1% of the State’s country — astir 509 sqkm — accounts for extreme-intensity transgression hotspots, portion astir 30% falls successful low-to-moderate strength zones.
An investigation of the recorded incidents revealed that wildlife crimes were concentrated successful the Shivalik foothills and wrong the districts of Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Pathankot, Rupnagar, SAS Nagar, and Tarn Taran.
Bushmeat trade
The survey identified chaotic boar arsenic the astir often targeted species, often linked to bushmeat commercialized and amerciable transport networks. In 1 case, 127 unrecorded and dormant individuals were seized.
The seizure of 201 shahtoosh shawls during the survey play suggested the sidesplitting of hundreds of Tibetan antelopes, exposing connections to planetary trafficking chains. The Tibetan antelope is recovered successful the Qinghai and Xinjiang regions of China and the Ladakh and Karakoram regions of India.
Similarly, the beingness of marine products successful a landlocked State specified arsenic Punjab signalled long-distance smuggling networks. The researchers noted that transit hubs, including Amritsar and (border point) Attari, are progressively being flagged arsenic captious nodes successful amerciable wildlife commercialized routes.
According to the study, transgression methods utilized scope from nets, clutch-wire snares and metallic traps to firearms and trained dogs, pointing to a premix of opportunistic poaching and organised crime. It besides noted the betterment of wildlife derivatives similar tiger skins, carnivore bile, coral, and lizard oil, indicating blase proviso chains that widen acold beyond Punjab.
The researchers suggested targeted enforcement, amended monitoring, and stronger inter-agency coordination to cheque wildlife crimes successful the bluish Indian State bordering Pakistan.
