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The Basistha Centre

The Basistha centre is within a patch of local forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, the largest city of Assam and the twelfth busiest in India. We watched many bird species during our breaks, including a family of oriental pied hornbills.   

The PHCP is overseen by Dr Parag Deka, Director of Durrell's India Programme and a fellow veterinarian, who has dedicated his career to the conservation of this species. The passion of Parag and the team infectiously radiated from them, and as they welcomed me to Basistha, I felt that the days to follow were going to be as productive as they were inspiring.     

The centre is currently home to many breeding pygmy hogs. Over my few days here, I got to see the working routines, diet preparation and presentation, biosecurity, and medicine protocols. This allowed me to begin to understand the site, the animals and the systems of care around them to ensure their health and welfare. The Basistha centre was the first pygmy hog breeding centre built, breeding hoglets for release into the wild and to further gene pools.  

Orang National Park

On route to the Potasali centre, we stopped off at Orang National Park, a site of previous pygmy hog releases, where the species is now living and reproducing in the wild. The vastness of the grasslands where the hogs live was the first thing to strike me. The grass is as tall as an elephant and sweeps across the landscape, seemingly from horizon to horizon. That said, this fragile habitat is under threat from burning by humans, the encroachment of forests (which bring risks of wild boar and infectious disease to the pygmy hogs), and invasive plant species, slowly changing the plants of the grassland.   

Several PHCP colleagues work solely on these aspects, mitigating infectious diseases by training local communities in veterinary biosecurity and maintaining the grassland habitat by removing invasive species and woodland encroachment.    

In Orang National Park, we saw a spotted owlet, crested serpent eagle, and my first wild rhino! The greater one-horned rhino swam across a wetland in front of us with an egret on its back. I felt very lucky to witness such a sight and see this species, which is synonymous with Assam. Twenty-three tigers also call this National Park home, but we did not see any signs of them during our visit.   

The Potasali Centre

The pygmy hog centre at Potasali is a much bigger facility, and I spent most of my time there during my visit. The centre is five hours from Guwahati, along busy roads heading towards the East Indian Himalayan foothills. The centre is in a very rural area, surrounded by small local communities, many of which farm pigs and represent a significant biosecurity risk for infectious disease to the pygmy hogs.   

Capped langurs and elephants roam the local Nameri National Park, with the langurs making regular appearances in the trees of the centre and even elephants sometimes visiting (finding wild elephant dung on the road you are walking to work is truly thrilling, I can attest!).    

Potasali is home to 35 adult pygmy hogs, and although some breeding does occur here, the centre was established to be a site to prepare selected young hogs before release into the wild. Four large pre-release enclosures are densely planted with the tall grasses of the natural habitat, and the pygmy hogs are cared for in a way that reduces human contact and association. These hogs live in the pre-release enclosures for up to six months before release.