The
Way of the Tiger: Natural History and Conservation of the
Endangered Big Cat.
K. Ullas Karanth. 2001. Voyageur
Press, Stillwater, Minnesota. 132 pp., clothbound. $29.95.
In
1987, K. Ullas Karanth was a student in the National Zoo's
Wildlife Conservation and Management Training Program. He
went on to earn his Ph.D. studying tigers and today, he is
a senior scientist and director of the Wildlife Conservation
Society's India program. In years to come he will be recognized
as a giant in India's environmental history.
The Way Of the Tiger is his story and what a wonderful story it is. It is also the most up-to-date, comprehensive account of the biology and behavior of these awesome predators available.
"When you see a tiger it is always like a dream," Karanth once said. The most outstanding conservation scientist working in India today, he was a pioneer in putting wildlife conservation in India on a scientific footing. Because of this, as well as his mentoring of a whole generation of students and acting at the highest levels of the Indian government, the tiger will survive in the wild and we will still have tigers to dream about.
Karanth has the rare ability to identify the barriers to wildlife conservation and then break these down into technically practicable and politically feasible scales. Or, as he wrote, "…vision, persistence, thinking at the right social and spatial scales, and constructive dialogue are the keys to the tiger's future." No conservationist is more committed to bringing rigorous science to tiger conservation than Karanth, but he recognizes fully the importance of the right vision and knows that the tiger will be lost without it, no matter how good the science.
In The Way of the Tiger, Karanth articulates his vision and presents a road map for securing a future for wild tigers in India. Based on two decades of groundbreaking studies of carnivores and their prey in India's Nagarahole National Park, he argues that it is not poaching or a decline in the amount of habitat that endangers the tiger. After all there is an estimated 116,000 square miles of potential tiger habitat in the Indian subcontinent. It is the quality of this habitat that will determine the future of wild tigers.
The tiger and other large predators and their ungulate prey are in decline in most Indian forests. But in Nagarahole, he has seen how a region can recover, given a chance. In The Way of the Tiger, he brings together the ecological information necessary to sustain rare species. He developed a simple axiom: To sustain wild tigers, conservationists must find the ways and means to protect the prey-deer, wild swine, and wild cattle-upon which tigers depend, and to create prey-rich core areas for tigresses to rear their cubs free of human disturbance. Seemingly obvious, this formula was not widely recognized until Karanth went out on the stump and told anybody and everybody that this was the only way to save tigers in India. He enlisted students and associates to tell this story over and over. And Indian conservation authorities are beginning to listen.
All of India's protected areas cover only about 20 percent of the forests that are potential tiger habitat. And most of India's major protected areas, including Nagarahole, are home to large numbers of people who legally live and farm and illegally hunt inside their boundaries. This is a major impediment to the long-term survival of these special places. Moreover, there are hundreds of thousands of "crop protection" guns in forest villages, and they are used to vastly reduce the tiger's prey. Freely available poisons from cyanide to various pesticides are used to kill tigers that kill the domestic livestock that inundate these forests.
Yet Karanth was an early proponent of shifting the limited resources available for tiger conservation away from anti-poaching activities and toward retaining and restoring tiger habitats, starting inside protected areas. "Identifying, protecting, and maintaining and monitoring such prey-rich enclaves, embedded within larger landscape matrices under multiple uses, should be the central concern of any future tiger population recovery," he says.
Karanth has shown that it is possible to recover tiger habitats but you have to engage local people living inside and near protected areas in a constructive dialogue and work through the issues involved to a win-win situation. Thanks to his efforts, the people living in Nagarahole have agreed to move to new, better homes. Prey populations are recovering. The tiger survives. His approach can now be adapted to more of India's protected areas.
Many conservationists, particularly in the West, believe high human population density leads to the likely extinction of large carnivores. This is the usual pattern, but not inevitable if wildlife policy and management are effective. In India, a country with staggering human population density, Karanth is making the critical difference in promoting effective policy and management to ensure a future for large carnivores. His courage is clearing a way for other Indian wildlife and conservation biologists to be heard. What he is doing, nearly single-handedly, is changing the entire Indian conservation culture from one based on emotion and opinion to one that is based on science and, equally important, sensitive to people.
Karanth understands that the future of India's rich biodiversity lies in dedicated conservation leadership. His own leadership and perseverance, through great hardship, has emboldened many others to take up the challenge. This story, which gradually emerges among his fascinating descriptions of all facets of tigers and their relationship to people, is in the end the most compelling part of The Way of the Tiger. You can read it to learn all we know about tigers, or to learn all we know about what—and who—will save them for our dreams.
—John Seidensticker
is Senior Curator at the National Zoo and Chairman of the
Save The Tiger
Fund Council.
ZooGoer 31(2) 2002. Copyright 2002 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
