Of late on this blog there has been much talk of tigers, but there’s been little mention of the crisis the tiger faces. It’s time we talked.
These three quotations, from books written over the past
century, illustrate the catastrophic decline of the tiger, and all the wildlife
and wild places associated with it, in just one hundred years. The first was
published in the 1920s, the second in 1944 and the third in 2006.
Of course, the big cats are a
nuisance. There are too many tigers and leopards in the jungle – so many,
indeed, that the few which are shot make scarcely any impression on their
numbers.
J. H. Williams
Elephant Bill
There is, however, one point on
which I am convinced that all sportsmen – no matter whether their viewpoint has
been a platform on a tree, the back of an elephant or their own feet – will
agree with me, and that is, that a tiger is a large hearted gentleman with
boundless courage and that when he is exterminated – as exterminated he will be
unless public opinion rallies to his support – India will be the poorer by
having lost the finest of her fauna.
Jim Corbett
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
I now know that India
Valmik Thapar
The Last Tiger
Read the
last one again. It was written by an energetic, charismatic man who has devoted
his life to the tiger and to his tidal-wave commitment to saving it. Valmik
Thapar is no quitter; but in these soul-strangling words he accepts that there is
no hope for the tiger. I read his book in Nagpur
Why then
has Valmik Thapar given up? His book was written in the mid-noughties, when
poaching had reached a new peak, smuggling to China
was rampant, India
But
the roots of the tiger crisis lie deeper by far, in the latter part of the
nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. At this time India , largely under the British
Empire , was engaged in a tremendous spasm of deforestation and a
conscious policy of driving out wildlife, such as the tiger, which came into
conflict with human interests. It is suggested that in 1900 at least 40,000
tigers walked the forests and grasslands of India India
This
catastrophic loss of tigers is where the real problem lies. Or rather, this
catastrophic loss of tiger habitat and tiger prey. It’s a fundamental of
ecology that
predators cannot survive without healthy stocks of their food. And in the case
of the tiger, the food is large and requires great areas of grazing and
browsing.
If we say,
for the sake of argument, that an Indian tiger, most conservatively, requires two chital per week, then a single adult tiger would need the equivalent of 104 chital per year. If today’s tiger population in India
were to eat only chital (an impossible assumption as many of the tigers live in
the northeast where there are no chital), this would mean 156,000 chital were
killed in India India in 1900,
this would mean 4,160,000 hypothetical chital killed by tigers alone in India
Chital in Pench National Park, India, by Anne-Marie Kalus.
Four million
chital, or thereabouts, or indeed their equivalent in sambar, hog deer, wild
boar, barking deer, barasingha and gaur, require unimaginably huge areas of forest and
grassland to survive. Unimaginably huge, that is, in today’s world. And of
course for every chital, barking deer or gaur killed, there have to be numberless
others which survive to breed if the tigers are to have prey in the future. The
fundamental problem then is human population, our demand for land to feed ourselves,
and the consequent massive-scale loss of habitat for the tiger’s prey and the
tiger. This habitat loss has occurred on a vast scale and continues today. All
around India
Don’t think
I’m moralising or – certainly not – sneering at cultures in the developing world. In Britain India ,
or any other country in the developing world, and shake our heads
self-righteously, not least in the case of India
Concomitant
with this apocalyptic loss of habitat is the terrible truth that the tiger’s biology and
ours don’t rub along very well. Almost everywhere in the world humans live – and we live
almost everywhere – we have traditionally grazed livestock. We have been doing
this for thousands of years and throughout this time we have taken a dim view
of other animals wanting our livestock for themselves. So for thousands of
years we have systematically driven predators, and there is no predator more
perfect or more powerful than the tiger, from the land we perceive as ours,
which is everywhere. It’s easy in the
developed world to look down on this practice as primitive. This is naive. In the UK we have extinguished wolves and bears and harried wild cats, polecats and pine martens to bleak corners of their once extensive ranges. We must
remember too that we in the developed world have not recently been poor. In our generation we do not understand what it means for all our wealth to be sunk in a single buffalo, nor the
devastation of that buffalo being taken by a tiger. For literal millions of
people in India
And it is
all too easy to dispense of a tiger. The tiger’s biology – tragically – means
there is a tendency for young animals, especially young males, to wander in
search of habitat at around two years of age. Dominant male tigers do not
tolerate the presence of young males which consequently are pushed out of their
mothers’ ranges and forced to carve lives for themselves elsewhere. Only there
is no elsewhere. Remember, we’ve chopped down all the forest, we’ve converted
it to farmland, we’ve forced the tiger and its prey into minute fragments of
habitat. Where then do our hypothetical young males go? They leave the forest –
they have no choice – and enter human-inhabited areas where their only possible
prey is livestock.
As I said
above, it’s all too easy to dispense of a tiger. A tiger in the wild will kill
a large animal, a sambar or a gaur, and stay by it for the two-three-four-five
days it takes to eat, returning generally by night to feast. If a tiger kills
your cow, perhaps your second cow, of only three, to be lost this way in your village on the
edge of a park where the rich and the privileged say we ought to be saving the
tiger, in desperation you lace the cow’s carcase with poison, knowing that the
tiger is nearby and will return for his kill in the night. Thus many a young
tiger dies, lost to the breeding population through this tangle of catastrophic
habitat loss, human inequity, and the tiger’s biology.
Finally,
there is the ghastly problem everybody knows about: poaching. In theory this is a tiny,
superficial issue compared to the cataclysmic loss of tiger habitat and the perfectly legal hunting of tigers
over the past century; yet it may well be the straw that breaks the tiger’s
back. In the mid-noughties it looked as though the loss of the tiger from India India to Tibet and China
in staggering quantity and India India
What then
can we do? What can the rich, distant, privileged do in the developed world to
save the tiger in the remaining scraps of forest in its Asian range? Our first duty is to inform ourselves, engage our minds with
the issue, become campaigners for the tiger and for all the wildlife and the people with whom the tiger shares its forest. Two excellent sources of
information on tigers, their habitats and the crisis they face are the Wildlife Protection Society of India, founded and directed by the energetic Belinda
Wright, and Tiger Time, which is led by the legendary wildlife artist David
Shepherd. These organisations’ websites give details of campaigns and projects in which they
are involved, including WPSI projects in partnership with Indian authorities, tiger reserves, and villages around them. Tiger Time is also the host of an urgent petition to persuade the Chinese government to ban all tiger trade in their country. This would not only shut down the abhorrent farming of tigers in China; it would also remove the blanket under which trade in wild tigers continues freely across India and Nepal's porous borders. On both websites there are opportunities to donate money to the conservation of the tiger in the field. Acting now is critical, if the tiger is to be saved.
We can save
the tiger, to the extent that tigers can still roam small, highly-managed
stretches of forest and grassland in India
Munna, the dominant male in much of Kanha National Park, photographed in November 2008 by Anne-Marie Kalus. Munna is laid-back, charismatic and readily identified by having CAT written across his forehead.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
Dr Seuss
The Lorax
The Lorax
