but much vigilance will be necessary if this remnant is to be kept free from domestic animals which are now encroaching upon this once inaccessible area’. Woodford (1979) also suggested that the genetic integrity of the wild form has already been lost in Ruhuna. To conclude, even if it is assumed that Wild Water Buffalo once occurred on Sri Lanka it seems unlikely that they survived the rinderpest outbreak and the subsequent genetic swamping by feral and domestic buffalo: consequently all free-living buffalo populations on Sri Lanka almost certainly contain genetic input from domestic or feral stock.