CHENNAI: A fierce looking animal sits inside a glass cage as one enters the Government Museum, Egmore. On display as the exhibit of the week, it is a stuffed specimen of the endangered Malabar Civet, which is restricted to the Western Ghats. Due to loss of habitat and indiscriminate hunting for its musk glands and purported healing powers of its various other body parts, the animal has not been sighted in its natural habitat for more than 40 years. It is listed as critically endangered in the Red Data Book of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).JR Asokan, Curator of the Zoology Department, Government Museum, Egmore, says, “This is the only such specimen available in India. In many museums, the skins are available but none are specimens that allow visitors to see how exactly it would look.” Even photographs of the carnivorous mammal are hard to come across as the last one died in a Thiruvananthapuram zoo a few years back, he said, adding that efforts at breeding them in captivity were not successful. Of the nine varieties of civets found in India, the Malabar Civet is the biggest in size. The last unconfirmed sighting of the animal was in the forests of Kerala way back in 1991. If the animal is not sighted in a few years, the IUCN will put it on the list of extinct animals.Many visitors to the museum admitted that they had not heard of the existence of such an animal, nor that it was endangered or possibly extinct. “We want to create an awareness for this very reason,” said Asokan.
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