The enforcement record has to be read against what happened in this landscape recently. In June 2025 a tigress and her four cubs were found dead in the Hoogyam range of MM Hills, with poisoning of a cattle carcass used as bait suspected, and senior officers were suspended for negligence. On 15 August 2026 three suspected poachers were shot dead by forest personnel at Chikkallur inside the adjoining Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in Hanur taluk; post-mortem findings of close-range wounds put the department's self-defence account under scrutiny, and anti-poaching camps in the area were attacked afterwards. A sanctuary that concentrates such a large share of the state's poaching and arms cases is therefore not merely a statistical outlier. It is where Karnataka's wildlife enforcement is being tested hardest.

MM Hills is not an isolated block of forest. Its value is that it stitches together the BRT Tiger Reserve, Sathyamangalam and the Cauvery sanctuary into one of the largest contiguous tiger and elephant landscapes in southern India, a corridor across the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu boundary that lets breeding populations move and mix. Poaching pressure concentrated in the connecting tissue of a landscape does disproportionate damage: it does not simply remove individual animals, it can break the corridor function that makes the surrounding reserves demographically viable. That is also the argument for the tiger reserve upgrade, since reserve status brings a core-and-buffer regime, dedicated central funding under Project Tiger and NTCA oversight that a plain wildlife sanctuary does not command.