LIEUTENANT-COLONEL Sanjaya Deuja, a battalion commander in the Nepalese Army, knows there can be no let-up.
When the army was diverted from wildlife-protection duty during Nepal's decade-long civil war, which ended in 2006, poachers targeted the country's prized wild rhinos, killing as many as 38 in one particularly bad year.
It was a serious blow.
Of the 3,000 greater one-horned rhinos left in India, Nepal and Bhutan, Nepal has only about 500 now.
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"It was a very bitter experience, but we learned from it," said Lt-Col Deuja, who is in charge of the battalion that patrols Chitwan National Park, a World Heritage Site and home to most of Nepal's rhinos.
There are now some 2,000 soldiers patrolling Nepal's three rhino reserves.
In 2011 and 2013, Nepal reported no rhinos or tigers lost to poachers.
This is a remarkable achievement for a country like Nepal, which is plagued by a series of dysfunctional governments as well as major infrastructure and resource problems.
More than that, it is located next door to the world's biggest market for rhino horns - China.
The praise came from wildlife conservationists attending a four-day Zero Poaching symposium in Kathmandu last month.
Officials of government security and wildlife agencies, as well as non-governmental consultants, activists and analysts from 13 Asian nations, gathered to discuss adopting the goal of zero poaching.
The illegal wildlife trade, estimated by Interpol to be worth US$12 billion (S$16.4 billion) per year globally, is draining Asia's biodiversity on an industrial scale, experts say.
While most eyes are trained on the devastating slaughter of the African rhino species to feed the demand for rhino horn - priced higher than gold or cocaine for its wrongly assumed medicinal properties - the daily battle to save the remaining greater one-horned rhinos is less recognised.
Poachers target these rhinos regularly in Nepal and north-eastern India.
Kaziranga National Park in the state of Assam in India has over 2,000 one-horned rhinos - the largest single population in the world.
Between 2012 and last year, Kaziranga lost 109 rhinos to poachers.
The poachers are usually locals with knowledge of the terrain and rhino habits, and are recruited for about US$100 or so by middlemen filling orders from foreign buyers.
The poachers sometimes use snares and pits to trap the rhinos, or electrified cables to electrocute them.
Mostly, they just shoot the animals.
While many poachers are barefoot hunters using old British .303-calibre rifles, others are more sophisticated.
In one incident in January, poachers in Kaziranga were found using silencers on their weapons.
Occasionally, especially in Assam, poachers, who are former insurgents, kill the rhinos using high-powered rifles.
With the army patrolling the jungles in Nepal, and less well-equipped, but no less dedicated forest guards in Kaziranga, the poachers have to be swift. Once the rhino is down, they close in and saw or chop off the horn.
Sometimes the rhino is not dead when they do this, but merely incapacitated. There have been instances of rhinos dying slow and agonising deaths after the poachers have left.
Then there are the shoot-outs.
A forest guard and three poachers were killed in separate gunfights in January in Kaziranga, the only national park in India where shoot-on-sight orders have been in place for years to combat poaching.
Lessons from Nepal and Assam are important for the region, because they demonstrate political commitment which is often lacking elsewhere.
Both places take rhino protection seriously because the animals are important for their tourism industry.
In Assam, the rhino is ubiquitously used in logos of businesses, from the hand-painted signboards of small shops on the dusty streets of Guwahati and Tezpur, to the state's petroleum company Assam Oil.
While high-value species like tigers and rhinos were inevitably the focus at the symposium, some attention was drawn to entire ecosystems being undermined by poaching, most acutely in South-east Asia.
In the Nakai-Nam Theun National Protected Area in Laos, for instance, it is easy for a person to find as many as 500 wildlife snares per day, said Mr Simon Stuart of the United Nations' International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
And that is only locals poaching for meat.
Much of the discussion at Kathmandu was on legal and operational frameworks, surveillance and forensics technology, and the experiences of different countries, as well as the importance of joint operations combining the resources and expertise of non-governmental organisations and law enforcement agencies.
Coincidentally, during the symposium, officers from Nepal's Central Investigation Bureau flew to Kuala Lumpur to pick up rhino poacher Rajkumar Praja and take him back to Nepal.
Praja, 31, had been on the run since 2013, escaping a swoop by Nepalese enforcers on more than a dozen men suspected of killing 19 rhinos in Chitwan.
He was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 15 years' jail.
In December 2013, an Interpol Red Notice that seeks the location and arrest of a wanted person with a view to extradition was issued. In January, Malaysian police found and arrested him.
The Praja case demonstrates the rewards of cooperation across borders, security experts say.
With the illicit wildlife trade involving transnational crime syndicates, the sharing of intelligence, joint cross-border operations, good investigative casework and forensics, as well as well-trained prosecutors and responsive courts, are all critical.
But in some countries, the response has been slow.
Kathmandu-based Dr A. Christy Williams runs the World Wide Fund for Nature's rhino and elephant conservation programmes.
He recalled that when he started work in Asia in 2000, there were tigers in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, some of which were still breeding.
Today, there are no more breeding tigers in these countries.
Numbers have dwindled to just around 30 in each country.
"That is a shame," he said. "To me, if a country like Nepal can do it - not lose an animal when everyone else around is losing them - then much wealthier countries should be able to do it easily."
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From:
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