How Lady Curzon Saved the Rhino!

Here’s a wonderful little article from an Indian website. Who knew that Curzon was a environmentalist of the Teddy Roosevelt variety?

Most Indians may remember Lord George Curzon as the man who sowed the seeds for the Hindu-Muslim divide during his tenure as viceroy between 1898 and 1905. But a hundred years later, one state has gone out of its way to erase that bitter memory by honouring Curzon’s grandson for something that his wife Mary Leiter did—speed up the process of reserving an area for a rhino sanctuary…

According to Nitin A Gokhale and Samudra Gupta Kashyap, co-authors of the coffee table book Kaziranga: A Rhino Century, ‘Although Lady Mary Leiter Curzon is often credited with having told her husband, Lord George Curzon, the Viceroy of British India, to take urgent steps to save the rhino, it was Nigona shikari who actually convinced Lady Curzon about the existence of the great one-horned Indian rhino in the forest that we today know as Kaziranaga National Park’…

Lady Curzon, on her return to Calcutta, pressed her all-powerful husband to issue orders that would prohibit the hunting of rhinos in Assam.