At the turn of the 1800s thousands of rhinoceros roamed the forests especially in the remote highlands of South East Asia.
Belonging to the Sumatrenis species, the two-horned Asian rhinoceros were mainly confined to Borneo, Sumatra and Malaya.
Consider the fact that it was a Sumatran rhinoceros who led a Berawan native up to the Mulu’s world-famous pinnacles during Sir Edmund Shackleton expedition!
Sadly, over the last 70 years, native hunters involved in the rhinoceros trade have led to the dramatic extinction of the specimen. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were only a handful in captivity and almost none in the wild.
Sometime in the 1980s, hunters reportedly found the tracks of a family of rhinoceros, a bull, cow and a calf, around the Batu Lawi area in Ulu Limbang. But the authorities were unable trace the family after that.
By 2008 the Sabah-based Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA) said there were only 10 rhinoceros left in the island of Borneo; three of them, Puntung, Tam and Iman had been captured from the Sabah forests in 2008, 2011 and 2014 in an effort to save the last of Borneo’s Sumatran rhinoceros. All were sent to the Tabin Wildlife Reserve for rehabilitation and reproductive purposes.
However, 10 years later on June 4, 2017 the 25-year-old Puntung — named because one of its legs had been cut off by a hunter’s trap — had to be euthanised because it had cancer. In late May 2019, Tam, a male rhino died leaving his partner Iman.
Sadly, Iman will be Borneo’s last captive rhino because she cannot reproduce due to a ruptured tumour in her uterus.
Looking back the demise of Borneo’s Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) — the world’s smallest rhino species — it started long before Malaysia was formed.
Early commercial activity between the East and West took place when traders from China, India and Europe made their way to the Far East to trade for prized exotic forest resources.
In exchange for the items, the local inhabitants of Sarawak received in kind metal objects which were useful for the warring tribes; utilitarian ceramics, large jars and beads which were infused into the culture of the ethnic groups; and textiles which took the place of bark clothing including the common “cawat” loincloth.
With the installation of James Brooke as Rajah of Sarawak in 1841, such barter trading continued until it was decided that a stable government needed a strong economy as Sarawak’s forests were abundant with natural resources
In the pre-war days, Chinese medicine practitioners sought rhinoceros horn and other animal parts under the illusion that they could cure illness or possessed aphrodisiac properties.
During the era of the last white Rajah Vyner Brooke, at least 100 rhinoceros fell to the guns, spears and traps of its natives — and not fault of theirs — due to the great demand of rhino parts.
Strange enough, an 1893-1894 scientific expedition in the Upper Kapuas area in Kalimantan Indonesia — adjacent to the present one million acre trans-boundary Batang Ai-Betung Karihun Wildlife Reserve — found no signs of rhino in the border region.
Even in 1937, Sarawak Museum’s Curator Edward Banks led another expedition to the Upper Trusan region which had a large population of rhinoceros and found that the native Lun Bawang of Sarawak and Lun Dayeh of Kalimantan had almost wiped out the whole ungulate population.
On March 25, 1945 Major Tom Harrisson who led a group of Allied Forces intelligence officers and raised an army of highlanders in Upper Trusan-Kerayan and Bario region, confirmed there were already no more wild rhinos along the border.
Harrisson who succeeded Banks as the curator wrote in the Sarawak Museum journal that he had only once spotted the fresh tracks of a Rhino at the Sarawak-Kalimantan border during the war.
He said: “I am probably the last non-Borneon to have crossed the fresh tracks of the two-horned Rhino. Today there are almost certainly not more than two living in Sarawak”.
Harrisson added: “Although any Dayak was free to kill one (rhino) on sight, the Sarawak museum has no specimens…it is the bitterest, most shameful void in all our collection.”
He said that the rhinoceros trade went back to the Tang Dynasty 1000 years ago, when they had mainly sought the product as far as Borneo.
Even now, rhino hunting is still a lucrative business because one animal carcass at that time could fetch several thousand dollars which was a large fortune in the old days.
Sarawak government records show that during the pre-War days there were at least seven rhino “slaughter houses” (abattoir) at Marudi, Lawas, Limbang, Belaga, Sibu, Kapit, Kanowit and Bintulu where scores of this animals were killed for profit.
In Marudi alone 70 rhinos were killed between 1925 and 1931 while dozens others in other locations. Harrisson said: “Unbelievable though it may seem, the government took no realistic action to protect an obviously vulnerable, slow-moving…and nearly blind beast.”
In the process of using the various body parts of the animal for religious purposes as well as its ground horn shavings for aphrodisiacal reasons, the native discovered a body part for a novel use.
It was also the “Orang Ulu” upriver natives and Ibans who later discovered that the rhinoceros was endowed with a unique sex organ in the shape of a cross-piece, decided to imitate and fashion one artefact for sexual purposes.
