A rare species of animal has been beaten to death on the pretext of digging a grave at Nasirgarh in Brahmanbaria.
Locals killed the animal in a pond near the house of former UP member Rahmat Ali on Sunday morning. The incident took place in Chitna village of Guniauk union of the upazila. According to the upazila livestock office, it is an endangered animal.
This animal is commonly known as Indian Palm Civet or Gandhagokul. It is not a carnivore, it lives by eating fruits and insects. It grows to five to eight feet long. Locals claim that when new bodies are buried in a cemetery, the animal picks them up in the dark of night and eats them. In the last three months, the animal has picked up five to six corpses from the grave and eaten them.
A man named Hazrat Ali died on Saturday. When he was buried, locals beat him to death when they saw him digging in the grave on Sunday morning. Nasirnagar Upazila Livestock Officer Chandan Kumar Poddar said the animal was never carnivorous. The animal is known as Gandhagokul.
It survives by eating fruits, rats and insects. He added that the locals may have panicked and beaten the extinct animal to death out of misconception. If the livestock department had received the news earlier, it would have rescued it alive. Writer and storyteller Sohrab Shant told Samakal that looking at the dead animal, it looks like Gandhagokul.
It is locally known as Tree Khatash, Bhodar, Asian Tal Khatash and Cyrel. As far as I know from reading the news of rare species being caught at different times, Gandhagokul lives in the bushes near the locality. They go out at night in search of food.
They feed on chickens, pigeons, rats, fruits, vegetables, palm or date juice. It can never eat human flesh.
UNO Nazma Ashrafi said it was very sad to kill this rare species of animal.
In order to sustain the biodiversity of Bangladesh, we have to keep all the extinct animals alive.
