The forgotten rhinos that once roamed the Bengal floodplain
For centuries, rhinoceroses roamed the plains and forests of Bangladesh. Now extinct locally, their absence exposes the fragility of ecosystems and the hidden cost of forgetting our wildlife
There I saw them — tiny white specks peering through the shimmering savannah under the African sun.
I was in Akagera National Park, Rwanda. My safari guide was narrating in a crisp African accent, "They were part of a 2019 rewilding programme. Chances are high we will see them."
As our jeep crept forward, the white specks grew larger — a slumbering crash of four rhinoceroses. They were white rhinoceroses.
Following the 1994 Rwandan civil war, Akagera lost all of its fifty-some rhinoceroses. Refugees returning to a war-torn landscape sought new spaces. New settlements required the taming of the African wilderness. Rhinos gave in, among many other large mammals. Today, Akagera is past its darkest days. It is now the largest protected wetland in Rwanda, and both rhinoceros species have been successfully reintroduced.
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As I went through the photographs and revelled in the memories, I found myself wondering, "Did I ever write anything about our rhinoceroses?"
There was a time when the sound of a rhinoceros moving through grass was part of the natural rhythm of Asia. Long before highways split forests and rivers were hemmed in by embankments, rhinos shaped landscapes simply by being present. They crushed saplings, opened clearings, fertilised soil, and carved paths that other animals followed. In many ways, they were living engineers of the floodplains and forests they inhabited.
Perhaps, to imagine a rhinoceros today is to think of Africa — dusty savannahs, dramatic charges, regal scimitar-shaped horns, and wildlife documentaries narrated in hushed awe. Yet the story of the rhinoceros is just as deeply Asian. For millions of years, rhinos roamed from the Himalayan foothills to the river deltas of South and Southeast Asia. Their disappearance from much of this range is not ancient history. It is recent, measurable, and, unfortunately, human-made.
Rhinos have always occupied a strange place in our imagination. They are massive yet vulnerable, armoured yet easily killed, ancient yet unable to withstand modern pressure. Across cultures, they symbolised strength and endurance. Across continents, they became trophies, commodities, and finally, ghosts.
The history of rhinoceroses in Bangladesh is blurry. Physical evidence is extremely scarce, written records are fragmentary, and verified specimens are almost nonexistent. One of the last tangible traces is Begum — a rhinoceros captured from the Hill Tracts and taken to a zoo in England during the colonial period.
Five survivors from a lost world
Today, only five rhinoceros species survive on Earth. Two are African; three are Asian. All are threatened. This alone should give us pause. Animals that survived ice ages, continental shifts, and prehistoric predators are now struggling to coexist with humans within a single century.
The Asian rhinoceroses are especially precarious. The Indian, or greater one-horned, rhinoceros, the Javan rhinoceros, and the Sumatran rhinoceros represent three distinct evolutionary paths. Each tells a different conservation story, but all are bound by the same pressures: habitat loss and poaching.
The Indian rhinoceros is the best known, and arguably the only Asian rhino with a cautiously hopeful future. Once hunted to the brink of extinction, it now survives mainly in protected areas of India and Nepal. Strict protection, armed patrols, and political will have allowed its numbers to recover from fewer than 200 individuals a century ago to about 4,000 today. It is a rare conservation success, but one that requires extraordinary effort and constant vigilance.
The Javan rhinoceros is the opposite. It is the rarest large mammal on Earth. Fewer than 80 individuals survive, all confined to a single national park in Indonesia. A disease outbreak, natural disaster, or poaching incident could erase the species entirely. Its silence is unsettling — not because it is safe, but because it has nowhere left to go.
The Sumatran rhinoceros may be the most tragic of all. The smallest and hairiest of rhinos, it once roamed across much of Southeast Asia. Today, fewer than 40 are believed to exist. Fragmented populations, low breeding rates, and forest destruction have pushed it into what conservationists quietly acknowledge as a race against time.
Experts have long speculated that the dense forests of Htamanthi in northern Myanmar may still shelter the Sumatran rhinoceros. But decades of poaching, armed conflict, and forest destruction have likely erased any remaining chance of its survival there. Today, both the Sumatran and Javan rhinoceroses have all but disappeared from mainland Asia and survive only in small, heavily guarded forests on the islands of Sumatra and Java.
When a horn becomes more valuable than life
If habitat loss is the slow pressure suffocating rhinos, poaching is the blade. For centuries, rhinoceros horn has been coveted in traditional medicine and status markets, despite having no proven medicinal value beyond that of compressed keratin — no different from human fingernails. Yet belief, superstition, and stigma have proven more powerful than science.
In Asia, rhino horn became a symbol of wealth and cure, traded across borders and generations. Even as populations collapsed, demand persisted. A single horn could fetch more than gold on illegal markets. Rhinos did not stand a chance against modern firearms and organised trafficking networks.
But poaching did not happen in isolation. It thrived where forests were shrinking, governance was weak, and wildlife was seen as expendable. In many regions, rhinos were not just killed; they were abandoned by policy and erased by neglect.
The violence of this trade is not abstract. This October, during floods in Assam, the carcass of a rhinoceros was washed into Bangladesh's Kurigram district — its horn brutally hacked off, the body likely discarded once the prize was taken. The animal crossed a political border in death, exposing how porous conservation truly is within a shared river system.
Even private ownership has not been immune. In South Africa, a prominent rhino farm owner — once hailed as a 'conservation icon' — was recently arrested for trafficking horns from animals supposedly kept for 'conservation'. These incidents reveal a grim truth: where a horn holds more value than a living animal, protection collapses, regardless of geography or intent.
Bangladesh's lost rhinoceroses
Few people realise that Bangladesh once had all three species of Asian rhinoceros. Rhinoceroses inhabited our floodplains, mangroves, and grasslands. They lived in the forests of the southeast — what is now Chattogram and Cox's Bazar.
Historical records, colonial hunting accounts, and early wildlife surveys confirm their existence well into the 19th century. Rivers such as the Teesta and Brahmaputra once supported rhino habitat. The hill forests were continuous, connected, and vast.
Then came the familiar sequence. Grasslands were converted to agriculture. Forests were logged and fragmented. Rhinos were hunted for sport and for their horns. There were no protected areas, no conservation laws, and no sense that these animals might one day vanish completely.
By the time wildlife protection became a formal concern, it was already too late. The last rhinos disappeared quietly. There was no final photograph, no conservation emergency, no public mourning. The land did not lose its rhinos in a dramatic collapse; it lost them through indifference.
The history of rhinoceroses in Bangladesh is blurry. Physical evidence is extremely scarce, written records are fragmentary, and verified specimens are almost nonexistent. One of the last tangible traces is Begum — a rhinoceros captured from the Hill Tracts and taken to a zoo in England during the colonial period. Beyond such isolated records, Bangladesh's rhinos survive largely in second-hand accounts, travelogues, and fading memory, their disappearance preceding systematic wildlife documentation.
The absence we learn to accept
The disappearance of rhinoceroses from Bangladesh reveals something uncomfortable about conservation. We rarely reflect on what has already been lost. A country can forget an entire group of megafauna within a generation if there is no living memory and no visible absence.
As large mammals have largely vanished from our forests, generations of researchers have grown up working in landscapes already emptied of giants. Our scientific legacy has been shaped by what remains, not by what once was.
In losing the animals, we have also lost the apprenticeship of studying them — the ecological familiarity, the field traditions, and the continuity that produce mammal conservationists attuned to megafauna. The pipeline thins quietly, not because of a lack of interest, but because the subjects themselves are gone.
Remembering the giants
Rhinoceroses still walk parts of Asia, but only because extraordinary effort keeps them alive. Their survival depends on political commitment, community involvement, scientific monitoring, and the uncomfortable truth that conservation is both expensive and long-term.
Rhinos are not part of Bangladesh's national imagination today. They do not appear in schoolbooks and are rarely discussed in conservation narratives.
Yet the loss of all three Asian rhino species from one country should be a warning, not a footnote. It shows how quickly abundance can turn into extinction, and how easily "normal" shifts without us noticing. It is about remembering them — and learning from their absence. The rhino stands as a reminder of what happens when protection arrives too late.
