- At
the turn of this century, by general estimate,
100,000 tigers shambled over a vast range of
Asia extending from southern India to the
Siberian taiga and from the equatorial tropics
of Java and Bali to the Transcaucasus and
eastern Turkey. By 1950 one authority was
already predicting that "the species is now
on its way to extinction"; three years from
now, when the present century ends, perhaps no
more than 2,500 scattered individuals of
Panthera tigris will still wander a few isolated
regions of their former range.
A
Wildlife Conservation Society report in November 1995
proposed a total of "less than 5,000" wild
tigers, and most tiger biologists and conservationists
I have spoken with would set the number even
lower--possibly as low as 3,000. Certainly one cannot
accept the official figures of Asia's
"tiger-range states," which for political
reasons still claim ghostly tigers in battered
landscapes where no viable population could persist.
The
disappearance of this creature represents a great loss
to our earth, for the resplendent tiger rivals the
African elephant and the blue whale as the most
majestic and emblematic creature in the history of the
human imagination. Like most children, I was
fascinated by the great flaming cats of zoo and circus
and the striped exotic beasts of Oriental art--and
also, of course, by a tiger tale called Little Black
Sambo, which in its title and illustrations encouraged
whole generations in the mistaken notion that tigers
dwelled in Africa with lions. Then came Kipling's The
Jungle Book, with its mysterious great cats, Bagh and
Bagheera, and Jim Corbett's enthralling tales of tiger
hunting, related in such books as Man-Eaters of Kumaon.
Finally, in the late 1960s, I happened upon an obscure
masterpiece called Dersu the Trapper, by the Russian
Army officer and explorer V. K. Arseniev--the first
account I had ever read of the Amur, or Siberian,
tiger.
Since
reading Dersu and envisioning this great carnivore
moving along an icebound coast on the blue Sea of
Japan, I had always longed to see a tiger in the wild,
and in 1992 I made my first visits to tiger reserves
in India and the Russian Far East. I returned to both
countries in 1996, and just over a year ago, on a
bright cold January day, I had a sighting of an Amur
tiger bounding across the deep snow of a coastal
valley in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, deep in Dersu's
country.
The
Indian, or "Royal Bengal," tiger of Kipling
and Corbett is but one of the eight geographic races,
or subspecies, of this mighty animal, of which
three--the Caspian, Balinese, and Javan races--have
already vanished forever in our lifetime. Of the five
that remain--the Amur (or Siberian), Sumatran,
Indochinese, South China, and Indian--most reports
disagree on their status and distribution (a sign of
how much remains unknown about this secretive,
nocturnal animal even as it vanishes from the earth).
Yet most biologists would agree that three and perhaps
four of these subspecies are unlikely to survive the
first years of the new century. The Amur, South China,
and Sumatran tigers, according to most recent
estimates, total fewer than 1,000 animals among them;
and the Indochinese population, to judge from recent
surveys in Thailand, seems unlikely to amount to more
than a few hundred animals.
In
the opinion of most authorities, the Indian tiger,
Panthera tigris tigris, provides the main hope for any
future for the species. This spectacular flame-colored
race was formerly found throughout most of the Indian
subcontinent, as well as in Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Nepal, Bhutan, and western Burma. In India tigers have
been killed for sport for many centuries, but their
numbers were not seriously reduced until the advent of
firearms, which, in combination with trained
elephants, made tiger hunting one of the least
sporting diversions ever devised. Even as late as
1965, about 400 tigers were slaughtered every year in
India alone; meanwhile, tiger habitat was declining
almost everywhere due to swelling human pressures. In
1951 Jim Corbett warned that tiger numbers had fallen
to approximately 2,000 animals, and by the late 1960s
some researchers were estimating that no more than 600
wild tigers survived in all of India. In 1972 the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature,
along with the World Wildlife Fund, initiated
Operation Tiger, which was designed to raise funds and
public support for emergency government conservation
programs in Asia s tiger-range states.
The
same year, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi
sponsored a worthy initiative called Project Tiger,
setting aside nine tiger reserves. (There are now 23.)
In its first two decades Project Tiger raised $30
million--a very large sum for conservation, though
much less significant when one considers that in the
same period 10 human beings were born in India for
every dollar spent. The initiative was mainly funded
by international non-governmental organizations, which
put pressure on India's bureaucracy to produce
immediate results. They got them, too, at least on
paper, because from the start the eager
bureaucrats--from the smallest park official to the
ministers in New Delhi--reported nothing but the best
possible news. By the early 1980s, in fact, there
seemed reason to believe that the tiger population had
more than doubled, to a total of 4,300 animals, and
that Project Tiger was one of the great successes in
the history of wildlife conservation.
Of
all the tiger reserves, the most celebrated was
Ranthambore, in Rajasthan, a private province of the
maharajas of Jaipur since the 18th century. After
independence, in 1947, the maharaja had continued to
use Ranthambore as a hunting preserve, filling the
blinds with such august sportsmen as Prince Philip of
England. ("`Bagh! Bagh! Tiger! Tiger!,' cried the
beaters, moving the tiger toward the prince" is
the wry description of Fateh Singh Rahore, who has
worked at Ranthambore most of his life.) But in 1970,
with most of the tigers shot out, these executions
were finally stopped, and the following year Fateh
Singh was made Ranthambore's head warden. Under the
banner of Project Tiger, local villagers were
discouraged from poisoning or shooting tigers and
"encouraged" to move out of the park, and by
1979 the 12 villages in the center of the park had
been relocated. Two years later Fateh Singh was badly
beaten by local people for strictly enforcing his own
edicts. Nevertheless, the prey species had come back
in numbers, and the tiger too. By 1987 the 40
Ranthambore tigers, well protected and unafraid, were
the most readily observed and photographed in all of
India.
That
year, the impolitic Fateh Singh was removed from his
post for overzealous prosecution of his duties. In the
same period, the beginning of a fierce seven-year
drought encouraged the villagers around the park to
drive more herd animals inside its boundaries,
resulting in severe habitat destruction, which was
duly blamed for a sudden and rapid decline among the
tigers. The loss of cover worsened through the early
'90s, as drought and overgrazing continued, and
suddenly the first signs were appearing that the
Ranthambore tigers were more threatened than ever
before.
In
the winter of 1992, as a leader of an ornithological
safari to north-western India, I stopped for three
days at Ranthambore, a small, beautiful park where
lotus lakes and ruins, in an Arcadian setting of
overgrown temples and pavilions, are laid out beneath
an immense and ancient fort that rises from cliff
walls high above the forests. Sambar and spotted deer,
wild hog and gazelle were everywhere, as if they, too,
awaited the scarce tigers; and we marveled at fruit
bats and large crocodiles and exotic birds--the fish
owls and painted snipes and crested serpent eagles and
lovely rose-ringed, blossom-headed, and Alexandrine
parakeets.
Surely
this was the realm that inspired the Indian tiger
biologist Ullas Karanth to reflect, "When you see
a tiger, it is always like a dream." Every day in
the cold dawn we passed through the dark stone portals
to scour the dirt roads and lake edges and the dry,
grassy unlands. Here and there we found some fresh
scrapes and pugmarks, but we saw no tiger.
While
at Ranthambore, we paid a call on Fateh Singh, who
affects a kind of princely strut to go with his white
mustache, safari clothes, and Stetson hat. He gave us
tea at his farm at the edge of the reserve, where
tigers and leopards used to pad along beneath his
terrace. Poaching had increased so cruelly in the
years since his retirement that only the birds now
visited his pools. No, Fateh Singh sighed, the chances
of seeing a Ranthambore tiger now were small.
A
few months later, in the spring of 1992, a large
tiger-poaching operation was broken wide open at the
nearby town of Sawai Madhopur. Most of the killing had
been done by hunters of the Moghiya tribe, using
modern weapons--a man named Gopal Moghiya claimed that
12 were taken by his gang alone. The village herdsmen
had joined in, sprinkling poison on fresh kills that
tigers would return to, and selling off the skins and
body parts, which were smuggled to Delhi's Sadar
Bazaar district for processing. The skins, which might
bring $15,000 each, went mostly to Arab countries,
while the bones and other parts, ground to powder for
use in traditional medicines, went to China, Taiwan,
and the Koreas. The genitalia went to rich, flagging
Asians: A tiger penis brought $1,700 in Taiwan, where
a single bowl of penis soup cost $300. A single tiger,
for which the local poacher might be paid $100, may
produce 11 kilograms (about 24 pounds) of powdered
bone, which at $500 per gram might bring as much as
$5.5 million.
In
the great furor that ensued, the bureaucrats of
Project Tiger confessed that their tiger figures had
been inflated to please the Delhi politicians. An
honest census was demanded, and when the smoke
cleared, Ranthambore's proud 45 tigers had been boiled
down to an optimistic 28. Despite the presence of 60
forest guards, the missing tigers had been poached
with impunity and had disappeared almost unnoticed.
Today, according to Fateh Singh's disciple Valmik
Thapar, 15 tigers may survive at Ranthambore,
including perhaps 7 or 8 that "do not show
themselves."
In
the few years of intensified poaching that began in
1987, perhaps one-third of India's tigers had been
killed-almost as many as were said to remain in the
whole country at the time Project Tiger began. India
still claims 3,750 tigers and is formally committed to
protecting them. But few accept that rosy figure or
have faith in the commitment--not in the present
rancid atmosphere of governmental bribery and
corruption. To this day, except in a very few reserves
in India and Nepal, the Indian tiger is hunted
throughout its remaining range. Though still granted
about 60 percent of the wild population of the
species, the Indian race probably numbers no more than
1,500 animals--less than half the Indian government's
official face-saving figure.
One
of the last great redoubts of the Indian tiger lies in
the state of Madhya Pradesh, in the central highlands.
In 1963, when U.S. biologist George Schaller began a
pioneering study of Indian ungulates, he chose the
great Kanha plateau as his study area, not only
because it was huge and remote but because "there
were more tigers at Kanha than in any other area"
he visited. He reached this conclusion even though, by
his own estimate, Kanha's entire tiger population in
that period was approximately 11 animals.
Kanha
was one of the first reserves established under
Project Tiger--in fact, Bob Wright, noted entrepreneur
of the colonial-era Tollygunge Club of Calcutta, who
turned up at Kipling Camp, near Kanha, during my visit
there in February 1996, thought Kanha might have been
the very first one chosen. The camp is owned by his
wife, Anne, who assisted Mrs. Gandhi in founding
Project Tiger and was a founder of World Wildlife
India. Their daughter, Belinda, has since become the
most outspoken tiger activist in India.
The
Kanha reserve, designated a national park in 1976,
contains 940 square kilometers--not counting a buffer
zone of 1,005 square kilometers in which human
activity is restricted--and is one of the largest of
India's parks, though little visited by foreigners. In
eight splendid days at Kanha, I saw wild dog and
leopard and the mighty gaur, sambar, chital, barking
deer, barasingha, blackbuck antelope, and wild boar.
The only large animal I did not see was Panthera
tigris tigris.
Belinda
Wright was kind enough to put me up in Delhi on my
return from Kanha, and for three days we talked about
little except tigers, working around discreet phone
calls from informers in regard to her investigative
work for the Wildlife Protection Society of India, of
which she is executive director. One informer, a
jeweler, had just been offered two poached tiger skins
and might cooperate in setting up a sting; another
would come by later in the morning, to avoid the risk
of a tapped phone. Because her undercover work is
dangerous, Belinda lives in a small house out of the
city, and the garden enclosure is steel-fenced, with
heavy locks and two permanent guards.
On
my first evening in Delhi, we went to dinner with a
few friends at the house of Valmik Thapar, who had
worked with Fateh Singh at Ranthambore. Among those
present was Bittu Sahgal, editor of the wildlife
magazine Sanctuary ASIA. I asked my host how much he
and Fateh Singh had known about the extent of the
poaching at Ranthambore when I visited four years
earlier, and Thapar said that Fateh Singh already
suspected the worst. "I discounted it,"
confessed Thapar, a large, bearded man of intense,
brooding demeanor. "I simply did not wish to
believe what was happening to our tigers." Not
until the spring of 1992, when the scandal broke, and
it became clear that Ranthambore's tigers had been
reduced almost by half, could he bring himself to
accept what had already happened.
In
1994, when Wright uncovered the first evidence of
extensive tiger poaching at the Kanha reserve,
nobody--including her friends Thapar and Sahgal--wished
to believe her. Thapar nodded ruefully. Ranthambore
was different, he said--not only much smaller than the
huge and remote Kanha but pressed on all sides by
hungry humanity and far closer to the animal-parts
trade around Delhi. But eventually Thapar and other
wildlife people in India had to accept the fact that
poaching was epidemic, not only at Kanha but also
throughout most if not all of the new reserves.
In
the face of government indifference, Thapar and Sahgal,
with Wright and tiger biologist Ullas Karanth, founded
the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), whose
foremost mission was and is the protection of tigers
from the poachers. In 1996 this small and intense
group was joined by Ashok Kumar of the World Wildlife
Fund International's TRAFFIC network, which concerns
itself with the animal-parts trade the world over.
Mostly
because of Belinda Wright's operations, 82 people have
been taken to court for wildlife violations during the
past two years. Yet every last one of them has been
set free. Though. Wright is not bitter, as are Thapar
and Sahgal, she wonders if India has the will to save
its own wildlife, observing that the corruption in
high government has further weakened the faint resolve
that Project Tiger used to inspire in the politicians.
Despite
continuous and spirited disagreement, the dedicated
people of the WPSI are very closely bonded in their
cause. They cannot know what effect they will have on
India's bureaucracy, yet they think they are seeing
some small signs of progress. In any case, as Wright
and Thapar remarked separately, they are dedicated to
a life-long fight to save the tiger. After all, as
Bittu Sahgal says, "The tiger is the very soul of
India."
Throughout
the tiger's former and present range, the forces
acting to exterminate it are consistent, though they
might be ranked in different order from country to
country: ever-increasing human settlement; destruction
of habitat by lumbering, mining, agriculture, fires,
war, dams, and reservoirs; general access to modern
weapons, with increased hunting and poaching of both
the tiger and its prey animals; increased
confrontation between tigers and humans or livestock;
genetic drift caused by inbreeding due to isolated and
diminished populations.
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