Article

Rhinoceros sondaicus

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Rhinoceros sondaicus

C.W. Loch, a British resident in Perak during the early 1930s, published this comprehensive survey of the Javan or lesser one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) in 1937, cataloguing its geographical distribution across South and South-East Asia and estimating that fewer than seventy individuals remained in the wild. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1932 Sungai Lampan shoot, which had provoked public controversy in the Malayan press, Loch set out to consolidate all available evidence on the species’ range, numbers, and trajectory toward extinction.

Summary

Loch’s central purpose is taxonomic and biogeographical: to establish where R. sondaicus has occurred historically and where it still persists, distinguishing it from the closely related two-horned R. sumatrensis with which it is frequently confused in the field. He works through the species’ range country by country—Bengal, Assam, Burma, Siam, Malaya, Sumatra, Java, Indo-China, Borneo, and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Kwang-Si—drawing on museum records, colonial administrative correspondence, hunter memoirs, and his own observations from the Kinta Valley. A recurring problem he identifies is the unreliability of native testimony, since local peoples cannot distinguish the two species and often conflate them; definitive identification, he argues, requires examination of a killed specimen at close quarters (p. 143).

The Malayan section is the most detailed, documenting individual kills from 1816 (a calf on the Province Wellesley coast) through to the Sungai Lampan cow of January 1932, which Vernay shot for the British Museum. Loch records the circumstances of each—often unlicensed or accidental kills by police officers, planters, or forest officers—and notes the commercial pressure from Chinese buyers who paid substantial sums for horns, skins, and even urine and dung as medicine. He also records the 1933 misidentification of a large sumatrensis in the Sungai Bugis area as sondaicus, cautioning that the few remaining animals in the Erong-Chawang area of Perak may prove to be the two-horned species upon examination (p. 133).

For Indo-China, Loch relies heavily on correspondence with French colonial administrators and zoologists, including M. de Villa of Hanoi, Professeur Bourret, and the Governor-General’s office, to establish that the species persists in Laos, northern Annam, and southern Cambodia, though in declining numbers. He notes the absence of museum specimens from the region despite probable kills, attributing this to the high commercial value of trophies which incentivised secrecy (p. 142).

Key Findings

  • Loch estimates a total of approximately 66 living R. sondaicus across all ranges, with a probable range of 40–70; the single most secure population is a dozen or more in the Ujung Kulon Peninsula reserve in west Java (p. 144).
  • The Sungai Lampan rhino, shot by Vernay in January 1932, was an adult female measuring 5 ft 3 in at the shoulder and 10 ft 8 in overall; its skin was mounted by Rowland Ward and is held in the British Museum (pp. 137–138).
  • In Malaya, only six individuals were believed to survive in 1937: three in the Erong-Chawang area (Perak), one in the Lekir district (Perak), and two in the Kuala Selangor–Bernam River district (Selangor) (p. 133).
  • The last sondaicus shot in Burma was a full-grown female obtained by Theodore Hubback in 1920 near Victoria Point, Tenasserim; four specimens were thought to remain in the Kahilu Game Sanctuary (p. 131).
  • Chinese buyers paid up to 4,000 guilders (nearly £500) for a single horn in Sumatra, and a captured sondaicus in the Dindings in 1905 was resold from S$200 to S$500 before being shipped to Madras for Rs. 1,500 (pp. 136, 139).
  • The species was extinct in the Sunderbans by approximately 1890, with the last tracks recorded around 1887 and the last live capture (a three-foot-high female) brought to London in 1877 (p. 130).

Conclusion

Loch’s definitive assessment is that Rhinoceros sondaicus is on the verge of extinction across its entire range, with the sole exception of the Ujung Kulon Peninsula in west Java, where a small protected population offers the only realistic prospect of the species’ survival beyond the next century. He attributes the decline to a combination of slow breeding rates, agricultural encroachment on forest habitat, and unauthorised hunting driven by the commercial value of rhino parts in the Chinese medicinal trade.

Context

  • The article draws on correspondence with French colonial administrators in Indo-China, the British Museum, the Zoological Museum at Buitenzorg, the Indian Museum at Calcutta, and the Sarawak Museum, as well as on Barbour and Allen’s 1932 paper in the Journal of Mammalogy, which supplied the most complete museum specimen inventory available at the time (p. 146).
  • The study represents an early example of conservation-oriented biogeographical surveying in the colonial period, combining field observation with archival and correspondential research to produce what was then the most comprehensive account of the species’ distribution.

References