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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2006

Film star gets year in prison for poaching

JODHPUR––Indian film star Salman Khan, 40, on February 17, 2006 was sentenced to serve a year in prison and was fined an amount equal to about $125 U.S. for poaching two chinkara deer on the nights of September 26-27, 1998.


This was the first of four poaching cases pending against Khan, who is also fighting vehicular manslaughter charges in Mumbai for killing a man in a 2002 traffic accident.


Jodhpur Chief Judicial Magistrate B.K. Jain acquitted seven others accused in the 1998 chinkara poaching case, including comedian Satish Shah.


Among the stars-of-the-month depicted in the 1999 World Wildlife Fund-India calendar, Salman Khan often led illegal shooting parities into the Rajasthan desert during fall 1998, witnesses testified, but repeated complaints to police and wildlife officials failed to bring him to justice.


Finally members of the staunchly anti-hunting Bishnois sect gathered evidence of Khan’s activities, and marched 5,000 strong on foot to Mumbai to demand justice.


Fearing the Bishnois despite their reputation for practicing nonviolence, even at cost of their own lives, Salman Khan reportedly hid at the home of the chairman of WWF-India’s Rajasthan committee until his arrest.


The Khan prosecution was repeatedly delayed by witnesses who claimed to have forgotten key details and were often suspected of having been bribed.


Opponents of reintroducing sport hunting to India point toward the Khan case as evidence that Indian law enforcement is not strong enough to regulate a hunting industry.


U.S. President George W. Bush reportedly lobbied Indian Prime Minister Man-mohan Singh to accept U.S. funds for tiger conservation in July 2005, when Singh visited the White House, but Singh refused the money rather than give the U.S. leverage toward seeking to reintroduce trophy hunting to India.


Between Indian independence in 1949 until India banned sport hunting in 1973, U.S. hunters shot tigers and many other Indian animals to the verge of extinction.


Hunting money
“The Ministry of Environment and Forests might have ruffled diplomatic feathers by rejecting the U.S. government proposal for tiger funds,” noted Jay Mazoomdaar of The Indian Express in September 2005, “but donations are trickling in from certain American canned hunting organizations,” suspected of trying to establish a political foothold in India.


“Pressured by wildlife groups,” Mazoomdaar explained, “the U.S. government decided not to renew licenses for canned hunting” of species which are considered endangered or threatened abroad, “unless ranches donate 10% of profit toward conservation. Licence renewal applications submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service show that the 007 Ranch in Texas has been donating 10% of proceedings to Conservation Force to fund a Barasingha [swamp deer] project conducted by the Wildlife Society of India,” Mazoomdaar added, “run by faculty members of Aligarh Muslim University’s Center of Ornithology and Wildlife. The latest installment of $4,000 was paid in November 2004.


“Florida’s TRL Exotics claimed to have donated $250 to the Wildlife Institute of India, a claim dismissed by the prestigious institute,” Mazoomdaar continued.


“We get money from Conservation Force. But we have no idea if it comes from hunting ranches,” Wildlife Society of India vice president Afifullah Khan said.


Khan directs efforts to rebuild Barasingha populations in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve and Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary–– and Mazoomdaar had reason to be skeptical of the involvement of both Conservation Force and TRL Exotics.


Conservation Force founder John J. Jackson III is a Louisiana attorney who for nearly 40 years has specialized in representing hunters. His firm opposed listing African elephants and Baja desert sheep as endangered species, and won permission for hunters to import elephant trophies despite the CITES ban on trafficking in elephant parts. Jackson is a past president of Safari Club International.


The Conservation Force board includes Jackson’s wife, former International Professional Hunters Association president Don Lindsay, hunting booking agent Bert Klineberger, French hunting advocate Bert-rand des Clers, and James G. Terr, a retired Texas A&M University professor who from 1969-1978 held the Caesar Kleberg Chair of Wildlife Ecology.


The chair was endowed by the hunting ranch developer who in 1924 introduced nilgai, or “Indian elk,” to Texas. Feral herds now roam the Rio Grande Valley––and as of January 2006 were targeted for culling by the USDA Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program.


“Both the 007 Ranch and TRL Exotics offer Barasingha as trophies for $4,500,” Mazoomdaar wrote.


Doing business as Double H Exotics in Wellington, Florida, TRL Exotics in mid-2005 sought U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service permission to allow trophy hunters to kill both ranched Barasingha and Arabian oryx.


Former U.S. Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich rallied opposition.