Mongoose Hair Brushes

Did you know that your art could kill a mongoose? Mongoose hair brushes are the biggest threats to mongooses in India, specially to India's most widespread mongoose species, the Indian Grey Mongoose. While there is growing awareness about this illegal trade, thousands of mongoose brushes are still confiscated in annual raids. Let us unite as artists to save the mongooses of India.

The comic appears in my column with Sunday Mid-day.

A Baby Seal's Last Wish

Seal hunting is one of the most gruesome forms of hunting, still practised in regions like Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. Baby seals are clubbed to death to avoid damage to the pelts from bullets. The prime victim of this atrocity is the Harp Seal, other preferred species being Hooded and Grey Seals. Although a majority of the hunting is with the use of firearms nowadays, hunting with the Hakapik, a wooden club with a hammer and a metal hook, is still common. The method involves striking the seal pup with the hammer and crushing its skull and then skinning the animal. Seal hunting has attracted severe criticism over the years and Canada, which is the largest seal hunting ground, is the centre of the seal hunting debate.

This cartoon appeared on my Gocomics page today.

Sea Otter Fur

Sea otters are native to the coasts of the North Pacific Ocean. Given that they have the finest and the densest fur for any animal on the planet, it is no surprise that they have been the victims of poaching for centuries together. Russian fur hunting expeditions of the 18th century had particularly played a major part in decimating sea otter populations, as a result of which the animal still finds a place in IUCN's 'Endangered' list, despite bouncing back from the brink of extinction following conservation efforts. It still faces a threat from poaching, pollution, oil spills and conflicts with fisheries.

The cartoon appeared in my fortnightly column in The Hindu's BLink last month.

Halloween in the Wild

Jaw traps for tigers, Traditional Chinese Medicine for rhinos, fur pelts for leopards, ivory products and AK-47s for African Elephants, snares for bears, deer, and various small mammals, gillnets for turtles and crocodiles, nets for birds and the list goes on. Poaching ranks aming the top international crimes today.

This work by Rohan Chakravarty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.