Saving the Tiger
by John Seidensticker
In a remote Javanese village, a farmer went out one morning to find a tiger sound asleep beneath his rice barn. Even sleeping, this tiger was a problem the farmer knew was beyond his ability to solve. So the farmer hastened to consult with his village head. The village head accompanied the farmer back to the barn, where the tiger still lay sleeping. Agreeing this problem was beyond both of their abilities, they hurried a few miles to tell the sub-district officer about the tiger. All three returned to the barn to view the sleeping tiger, then went off to enlist the help of the district officer. Moving up the bureaucratic chain to seek a solution to the sleeping tiger went on all day until finally a by-then large group of men reached the regional commander of the army. The commander marched out to the village and laid out a plan to deal with the sleeping tiger. But before it could be implemented the tiger woke up and left. So now they had a different, but still real problem: there was a tiger near the village but no one knew where it was. Suddenly, leaving the barn was a very risky proposition.
Anthropologist Clifford Gertz heard this tale in the 1950s, in the Southern Mountain region of Java, an area where Java's last tigers lived. It might have been a local joke about bureaucracy, as Gertz believed the story too well-formed to be literally true. But since I first heard this story in the 1970s, I have believed it to reflect the central dilemma in saving tigers. Lurking unseen or asleep under a barn, a tiger is perceived to be a problem requiring a solution-and it doesn't take too much imagination to predict what a military solution to this problem might be. To save tigers in Asia, this perception must change. We must find ways to make a live tiger worth more than a dead tiger, and landscapes with tigers worth more than without them.
A Brief History
Tigers are formidable predators.
They can and do kill people, but, through most of history,
people were poorly equipped to kill tigers. In some parts
of Asia, hunting tigers was the prerogative of royalty; in
others, trapping a problem tiger was the task of specialist
tiger magicians. Later, during the European colonial rule
that prevailed over much of the tiger's south and southeast
Asian range, and with the advent of modern weapons like high-powered
rifles, tiger hunting became the stuff of legends. Great white
hunters were enlisted to remove tigers that threatened people.
Jim Corbett, for instance, achieved fame when he was enlisted
to track down and kill India's "Champawat Tiger,"
which took 436 human lives, more than any man-eater in history.
Clearing a region of tigers also became a sign of progress
and modernization. In China, tigers were killed as vermin,
much the way wolves and pumas were in the American West. But
it seemed to those who hunted tigers and knew them best that
there would always be tigers somewhere.
Just a century ago, tigers ranged from the Russian Far East,
through eastern and southern China, Southeast Asia, the Indian
subcontinent, and into the Indus River Valley of Pakistan.
Separate populations of tigers also lived in and around the
Caspian Sea, and on three islands in Indonesia: Bali, Java,
and Sumatra. But even over this huge range, tigers were not
particularly abundant; large solitary predators never are.
Requiring huge home ranges and habitats rich in water, vegetation
cover, and deer and pigs to prey on, tigers numbered perhaps
only 100,000 individuals 100 years ago.
Today, however, the entire wild tiger population is somewhere
between 5,100 and 7,600, and tigers range only a fraction
of the area they once did. The tigers of Bali, Java, and the
Caspian Sea are extinct, and south China's are nearly so.
Tigers remain in 14 "range states": India, Nepal,
Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Malaysia, Indonesia (on Sumatra), China, Russia, and North
Korea, but their distribution is not continuous.
A 1997 World Wildlife Fund/Wildlife Conservation Society survey revealed that the areas where tigers could live-areas of suitable tiger habitat-in 12 of these countries (excluding Russia and China) were fragmented into about 160 distinct and disjunct blocks. Including Russia and China adds about seven more. Moreover, about 100 of these blocks, dubbed Tiger Conservation Units (TCUs), are very small and if they hold any tigers at all, they are unlikely to survive very long. The TCUs are separated by habitat that tigers cannot cross. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the remaining tiger habitat is outside of protected areas such as national parks. Most disconcerting is that even some areas of good tiger habitat lack tigers because populations of deer and wild pigs, on which tigers depend for food, have been so depleted by human hunting that tigers cannot survive there.
So while 5,000 to 7,000 tigers sounds reassuring at first, this would be true only if these tigers lived in one large population. In fact, the situation is desperate. Dividing those, say, 6,000 tigers by 160 yields an average of 40 tigers per TCU. For instance, along the Nepal-India border, tigers were historically distributed continuously across the lowland Himalayan forest. Today, four separate populations remain in this region, three in Nepal and one in India. The three Nepal populations are estimated to contain 48 to 49, 30 to 32, and 15 to 16 breeding tigers respectively; the Indian population is also quite small. To put these numbers in perspective, population biologists doubt that a population of 50 or fewer breeding females will survive over the long term.
The ease with which such small populations can be lost is frightening. Aside from the longer-term effects of reduced viability due to inbreeding, such populations may die out due to what scientists refer to as "stochastic events," and everyone else calls accidents or acts of god. An epidemic disease among the tigers or their prey, a drought or flood or fire, chance variation in birth and death rates that leaves only females or only males, or even a determined poacher-and tigers blink out of that area. Because inhospitable habitat bars new tigers from re-populating the area, tigers are simply gone. Biologists are looking carefully at Way Kambas National Park in Sumatra, 60 percent of which burned during 1997's El Nino-caused drought. About 36 adult tigers were living in Way Kambas before the fire; studies are underway now to see how many remain. Way Kambas is separated from the next TCU by 100 miles of hostile habitat, so there is little chance of tigers moving in from other areas; neither would tigers have been able to escape the fires to greener pastures.
Save the Tiger - Part 1
The cry "Save the Tiger" was first heard in 1969.
Almost 30 years later, the tiger's future is still not secure,
though not for want of trying. Eliminating the threats to
this endangered species has proven to be like putting out
a forest fire: As flames are doused in one spot, sparks begin
to fly in another.
At the 1969 meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (now IUCN-World Conservation Union), held in India, senior conservationists, many of whom had hunted tigers as youths and were intimately familiar with India's forest and wildlife, sounded the alarm about the disappearance of tigers. In 1972, a survey confirmed their fears: only about 2,000 tigers remained in all of India, and fewer than 500 in Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. This set in motion one of the most famous and extensive wildlife conservation initiatives ever undertaken in India, or, in fact, in all of Asia.
India's Project Tiger was launched in 1973 with the enthusiastic support of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a powerful patron. The tiger became India's national symbol. International conservation organizations rushed in to help, especially the World Wildlife Fund and IUCN-World Conservation Union, launching a fund-raising drive in support of Project Tiger and similar conservation efforts in other tiger-range countries. The Smithsonian initiated its Tiger Ecology Project in Nepal to learn about the behavior and ecology of tigers. Even before this, in 1970, tigers were placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List.
These efforts addressed what were then the primary culprits
in the decline of tigers: loss of habitat, and overhunting
for sport and to satisfy a demand for tiger skins to be fashioned
into fur coats and other luxury items.
Tiger conservation in India and elsewhere was implemented
through top-down, command-and-control programs in which the
tiger was treated as a public good. In India and elsewhere,
tiger killing was banned. Habitat for tigers was set aside
in specially designated tiger reserves, in which every effort
was made to separate tigers from people, usually by restricting
commercial harvest of forest or other products in these reserves
and by relocating the inhabitants. The hope was that tigers
protected in reserves would increase in number and then disperse
into non-reserved forest lands. Trade in tiger parts, especially
skins, largely came under control with the advent of the 1975
International Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES), and the tiger appeared, effectively, to have
been taken out of commercial trade. Public relations campaigns
made wearing tiger fur (and the fur of other endangered spotted
cats) unfashionable. The effort to save the tiger was off
to a respectable start, in a reasonably short period of time,
and many assumed that these actions would save the tiger in
at least part of its range.
By the mid-1980s, we knew that the Caspian, Javan, and Bali tigers were extinct and, after years of being hunted as vermin and for medicines, the situation of the South China tiger was critical. Sumatra's tigers, where forests were being rapidly transformed for agriculture and fragmented, were down to about 500. Details concerning the tiger's status remained unavailable from Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia. Yet there were glimmers of hope for the tiger based on the optimistic reports from India, research in Nepal, and ongoing censuses in the Russian Far East. Information coming out of the Russian Far East indicated that Amur (also known as Siberian) tigers were making a modest recovery. The continuing in-depth study of the ecology and behavior of tigers in Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park showed tiger populations growing. Some Indian biologists were describing ever-increasing tiger numbers, doubling from 1972's 2,000 to an estimate in 1989 of more than 4,000.
Then, almost at the moment when conservationists were prepared to declare that the tiger was on the way to recovery in at least part of its range, new information-and new threats-emerged.
India's increasing tiger numbers had been a beacon of hope for conservationists, many of whom believed that India was the one place tigers would make it. But in the late 1980s, the way in which these numbers were determined was questioned. As it turns out, there was no reliable information to justify India's optimistic numbers. In fact, careful studies indicated far fewer tigers existed than the official counts claimed. Furthermore, flaws began to appear in the model for India's Project Tiger. The limitations of the heavy-handed, top-down approach to protecting tigers, especially with diminishing central control, were becoming apparent. Because of human population growth in and around tiger reserves, people and their livestock were spilling into reserves, rather than tigers spilling out of reserves into surrounding forest areas, as was originally envisioned. At about the same time, the first scientific search for tigers in Thailand revealed that there was habitat for tigers in wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, but few or no tigers there.
Throughout the tiger's range, forest fragmentation was seen as a growing problem in Asia's increasingly human-dominated landscapes. Further, what forest remains suffers from excessive extraction of fodder and other products, including the deer and wild pigs on which tigers depend and which people also hunt to fill the cooking pot. With such pressure both within and outside of reserves, room for tigers has become vanishingly small.
The late 1980s and early 1990s also witnessed a sudden and
dramatic spike in tiger poaching, this time not for fur but
for bones and other parts used in Traditional Chinese Medicine
(TCM). Growing prosperity in Asia as a result of the region's
stunning economic boom, which enabled more people to be able
to afford tiger-based medicines, coupled with the near extinction
of tigers in China and Korea, was pushing this new demand.
In Nepal, India, and the Russian Far East, tigers began to
disappear practically before the eyes of scientists who were
studying them. Law enforcement officials were recovering large
quantities of tiger bones and other parts from smugglers,
and these were believed to represent just the tip of the tiger-bone
iceberg. There was also an increase in the legal trade of
tiger products among some nations that were not signatories
to the CITES agreement. Most of these tiger products were
destined for China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and other
Pacific Rim countries, as well as parts of North America and
Europe with large numbers of Asian immigrants who use TCM.
TCM use has also been growing among Americans and Europeans
interested in more natural, holistic approaches to health
and health care.
This is where things stood in 1994, when a Time magazine
cover shouted that the tiger was "Doomed," and U.S.
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt warned "There
may not be another chance to save tigers." This new crisis
galvanized the conservation community. It became clear that
saving the tiger was not a battle to be won once and forever,
but a continual process of holding old threats in check and
preventing new ones from emerging as conditions change.
India addressed this crisis with the 1994 formation of the
Global Tiger Forum, an attempt to engage the international
community in tiger conservation. The U.S. Congress passed
"The Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Act of 1994"
to assist conservation programs in nations with rhino and
tiger populations. Under this legislation, the Department
of the Interior funds small programs that enhance sustainable
development projects with an impact on the conservation of
tigers and rhinos. Also in the U.S., the National Fish and
Wildlife Foundation, in partnership with the Exxon Corporation,
pledged more than $1 million a year to a "Save the Tiger
Fund" to invest in strategic projects that would make
a difference to the tiger's future. Conservation organizations,
such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Conservation
Society, launched new programs and re-energized existing efforts
devoted to tigers. And new conservation organizations emerged,
here and in tiger range states, to help. Perhaps most important,
in the last few years all of these various players have recognized
the need for cooperation among themselves. Like tigers, the
biologists interested in tigers have been aggressively territorial,
a strategy that works better to enhance egos than it does
to save tigers.
Today's primary threats to tigers have evolved from those
of the past: loss of large, continuous blocks of habitat,
rather than loss of habitat per se; vanishing prey in the
remaining tiger habitat, largely due to people overhunting
for food the same species that tigers need for food; and poaching
and trade in tiger parts for medicine rather than hunting
for sport or fur. It's also clear that there is no universal
quick fix: we must define what is needed to save tigers in
each region of their wide geographic range. Understanding
and negotiating to meet these needs in the rapidly changing
natural and social Asian landscape is largely a political
and socioeconomic task, and ultimately an issue of social
valuation: How do you make a live tiger worth more than a
dead tiger? How do you make habitats with viable populations
of tigers worth more than habitats without them? How do you
meet the needs of people and tigers? We have returned to the
barn, so to speak.
Large blocks of habitat, blocks of habitat far larger than
can be contained only in reserves or similar protected areas,
will be needed to save tigers. As noted earlier, most of the
habitat that remains for tigers is outside of reserves. Conservation
action cannot stop at the borders of reserves, most of which
are too small to support viable populations of tigers for
the long term. Protected areas are necessary, but they are
not sufficient. We know now that conservation must take place
beyond the boundaries of these reserved lands, and that will
require addressing problems at the ecosystem level and including
all the stakeholders living and working in that ecosystem.
Reports from the Field
Take the issues surrounding the Amur tiger in the Russian
Far East. The estimated 450 or so remaining Amur tigers are
distributed over a vast mountainous habitat about 620 miles
long and 185 miles wide. This is roughly the size of Sumatra,
the world's sixth largest island, and the north-south distance
compares to that between Reno, Nevada, and Vancouver, British
Columbia, or between Washington, D.C., and St. Johns, Newfoundland.
The turmoil caused by Russia's rapidly changing political
system, with new economic constraints and opportunities, is
well known. These changes are also placing new demands on
the habitat of the Amur tiger, the prey of the Amur tiger,
and the Amur tiger itself. The old system of protection by
authoritarian rule and inaccessibility is fast disappearing.
Increased accessibility to tiger habitat through expanding
road networks leads to poaching of tigers and their prey.
In Russia, however, poaching is a loaded word. Hunting is a well-established tradition in Russia, and literally the entire adult male population in the Russian Far East hunts. Firearms adequate to kill large mammals are common. In these tumultuous economic times, need for food on the table has resulted in increased taking of deer and wild swine by urban as well as rural hunters. A long-standing American-style quota and permit system no longer works as it did under the old rule. This increased taking of ungulates is leading to a marked reduction in the tiger's prey populations. Of course, many hunters and their political representatives see this not as a problem of too many hunters but of too many tigers. Interest in ecotourism, which in India has translated into economic incentives for creating wildlife viewing, is more problematic in the Russian Far East, and there is serious talk of making the Amur tiger available for limited, high-fee sport hunting, anathema to many foreign conservationists but not to all Russians.
The hope for the Amur tiger rests in the fact that the Russians like tigers and people living in the vicinity of tigers show considerable tolerance of them. Additionally, we now know what it will require to maintain a viable population of Amur tigers in terms of land area and prey because of long-term research by the Hornocker Wildlife Institute staff and their Russian associates. For example, if 70 adult female tigers are to be maintained and each female's exclusive territory is 500 km2, as has been determined through extensive radiotelemetry, then about 35,000 km2 will be required to sustain these females and their cubs. Moreover, that area must include food for the tigers to eat.
A plan is under development that includes this information. This is a case in which the real needs of this tiger population, based on good science, have been brought to the policy table and before the public. There are few people spread over this vast region, and rather than attempt to stymie their efforts to improve their economic lot using the area's natural resources, conservationists are working with their needs.
Nearly 80 percent of the tiger habitat remaining in the Russian Far East is the province of Primorye, less than 10 percent of which is protected. The province's two million people largely rely on fish, timber, and other natural resources for income. Recently, the opportunity became available for individuals to lease rights to hunting units in this province. the Hornocker Wildlife Institute and a Russian non-governmental environmental organization, with funding from the Save the Tiger Fund, is planning to lease a 100,000-hectare (400 square mile) unit. This unit will be managed to support high densities of the ungulates tigers need to survive (and human hunters like, too) while local people can turn collection of fur, berries, herbs, mushrooms, and other non-timber forest products into a sustainable economic enterprise.
In other parts of Asia, the Global Environmental Facility, a fund managed by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program, is planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on projects to improve protected area management and to support ecodevelopment for communities living within and next to protected areas. These projects include offering micro-credit, training for alternative livelihoods, enhancing conservation awareness, providing education, and developing special joint forest management schemes-all designed to promote public support for conservation at the local level through improving living conditions in rural areas. Projects are being developed around five Project Tiger reserves in India, as well as in reserves in Indonesia, Laos, and China.
On a smaller economic scale, the Nepal project described by Eric Dinerstein elsewhere (It Takes a Village) offers a model for community-based conservation that could be replicated at many sites in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
Controlling the Tiger Trade
There has been a focused and sophisticated response to the
increase in poaching of tigers in the last few years. Several
organizations are working with governments to stem the trade
in tiger parts and products in Asian nations that are markets
for tiger parts. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea,
and Taiwan have strengthened their laws and policies to better
control the trade. In most of these countries, medicines containing-or
claiming to contain-tiger parts have been outlawed although
enforcement remains weak. Moreover, recent data suggest that
most of the remaining trade in tiger medicinal products occurs
outside of Asia, particularly in the United States.
With a large U.S. market for TCM, enforcement efforts need to be improved here too. Legislation currently being considered would make it illegal for a product to even claim it contained tiger or rhino parts, even if no such parts are present. This way, law enforcement agents would not have to prove these real tiger or rhino parts are present-which is nearly impossible-to prosecute a case.
Other range states have cracked down on poachers and are putting pressure on middlemen. Many groups are working, through education programs, to reduce the demand for tiger parts and products in traditional medicines. These efforts are showing signs of success, especially in the Russian Far East. There also appears to have been some decrease in tiger poaching in India, although the situation remains critical, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India. This group emphasizes the need to improve the training of border patrol and custom officers. It has also created a program to pay the owner of any cow killed by a tiger. This helps because poachers often pay cow owners to poison the tiger-killed carcass. The poacher then takes the poisoned tiger.
On another front, tiger conservationists have been meeting with TCM practitioners and users. These meetings have proven enlightening for both sides. Understanding the tiger's plight has led to efforts to perfect substitutes for tiger bones that could be included in the official TCM pharmacopoeia and that would also be acceptable to patients. Some suggest that replacing tiger parts with a substitute is largely a marketing problem: If users of TCM can be persuaded that a substitute is equally or more effective than tiger bone, users will switch.
Whether the current slowdown in poaching is simply a lull while the bad guys re-organize, or whether it is a real downturn, is yet to be determined. This situation must be carefully monitored. Containing market hunting, tiger poaching, and the trade in tiger parts and products will require an ongoing commitment calling for heroic individual and organizational effort.
The Role of Zoos
The partnership between zoos and other conservation organizations
to save the tiger and its habitat is significant and expanding.
More tigers live in zoos today than live in the wild, and
these animals provide a hedge against the tiger's total extinction.
Should reintroduction of tigers become feasible, zoo tigers
could be used in that effort. But the primary conservation
goal of most zoos today is to support conservation programs
on the ground and to keep endangered species, such as tigers,
alive and well where they live in the wild.
Zoos also offer unparalleled opportunities for education. Zoos reach large audiences within and outside of tiger range states through their exhibition, education, and training programs. (In fact, several of the world's most prominent tiger conservationists were trained at the National Zoo.) Zoos are also the only places most people will ever see a living, breathing, roaring tiger. And the support-moral as well as financial-of people everywhere is needed to save tigers. If people are to be partners in efforts to secure the tiger's future, the information and education programs are among the highest priorities. And people must be partners, or these efforts will fail. As sociologist Stephen Kellert recently said, "Support for endangered species conservation will emerge when people believe this effort enhances the prospects of a more materially, emotionally, and spiritually worthwhile life for themselves, their families, and their communities." The National Zoo's new Great Cats exhibit is designed to help foster this support.
There are those who believe that the tiger will be extinct in the next few years. I am not among them. Conservation does work. Witness the comeback of pumas in the western U.S., of alligators and crocodiles in the southeast, and of peregrine falcons that are flying again right here in the Washington area. Tigers have a substantial reproductive capacity and can bounce back given space and food, given a chance. There are too many people committed to giving tigers that chance for us to fail.
John Seidensticker is Senior Curator at the National Zoo and Chairman of the Save the Tiger Fund.
(ZooGoer 27(2) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
