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| Location: |
Asia - East Asia - Laos |
| Subject: |
Distribution - Records |
| Species: |
Asian Rhino Species |
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The most important events of our rhino search were two incidents involving separate hunting parties of twenty-six and nine Laos; both groups reported to Suwan that they had seen rhinos.
The second incident involved nine hunters from Boun Tai in Sithandone Province, and also took place in 1974. The men were sitting on a tree platform somewhere east of Ban Kok Padek (just across the Cambodian border), waiting for an elephant to visit a mineral lick below their tree. During the moonlit night an animal did come to the lick, but they couldn't tell what it was. It had no trunk, however, so they felt sure it was not an elephant.
The next morning they climbed down from their platform and found tracks very similar to those of an elephant though considerably smaller. They knew then that what they had seen was a rhino. Before the hunt was over, one of the men was killed and another wounded by Khmer soldiers. This bolstered their belief that rhinos do have bad phi.
A number of other reports suggest that rhinos still roam that part of Laos -- and perhaps other parts as well. Refugee camps near Pakse were visited, and this enabled us to get information from dozens of villages which would have taken us months to collect if we had had to travel through the mountainous country from which the villagers came.
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Kouprey clues & rhino news
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