Can Humans and Rhinos Coexist? One Town Is Finding Out.

When humans and megafauna encounter one another, it tends to be at a safe distance for both parties. Interactions between the two are now always peaceful: you may recall the reporter who wisely got out of the way of some approaching bison in 2020; more recently, a herd of elephants trampled a hunter to death in Gabon. And yet, the residents of one town in Nepal are learning to coexist as best they can with some much larger mammals that also call the region home.

In an article for The Guardian, James Whitlow Delano takes readers to the Nepali village of Sauraha, where residents are experiencing some unexpected visitors: rhinos who live in the region now making their way through town. As Delano reports, this has led to some contradictory outcomes: one one hand, an increased number of tourists looking to experience large wildlife up close; on the other, a growing need to educate locals about how best to coexist with megafauna.

The images accompanying the article are striking: you don’t often see humans and rhinos in such close proximity, but the sense of perspective that comes from seeing them near one another also gives a sense of just how massive a rhinoceros is. And that’s before you get into the fact that, again, they have horns. That can turn out badly for people in their vicinity: earlier this month, a conservationist was gored to death by a rhino in South Africa.

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Among the people working to make sure that the residents of Sauraha are safe in their interactions with wildlife is Doma Paudel, who founded the organization Wildlife Victim Fund and led a workshop earlier this year related to keeping people educated about the issues at hand. Paudel told The Guardian that wildlife populations are growing — something that’s likely to make the issues facing Sauraha even more widespread in the coming years.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…