052 / / JANUARY 2017
Whatever the case, tigers
won’t be getting crossed off
the International Union for
Conservation of Nature’s
Red List of at-risk species
anytime soon. Of the six
surviving subspecies, the
most common, the Bengal
tiger, is listed as endangered,
with around 2,500 wild
individuals, the majority in
India. The rarest, the South
China tiger, is one of the most
threatened animals on the
planet: no sign of one has
been seen in the wild for the past 25 years.
Take a look at a tiger and it is almost impossible to imagine
how they could ever disappear from our planet. So brawny
(adult males can be three metres long and weigh 200-300kg),
so agile, so powerful – they’re an awesome presence. Basker
says he’ll never forget his first close encounter with a wild
Bengal tiger, on the Kanha reserve in central Madhya Pradesh
state. ‘It’s a real adrenaline rush,’ he says. ‘You’re really scared
but also really excited. It stays with you for a long time. It’s like
looking at the stars: it makes you aware of your insignificance.’Animal attraction
Tigers inspire wonder, but also fear – and this perceived threat
has made them a target. As human activity grew across
Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the big cats were
increasingly drawn into conflict with people. In British India
alone something like 33,000 people were killed in Bengal tiger
attacks between 1876 and 1912. Exterminating these perceived
Shere Khan-style man-eaters was positively encouraged,
whether via big game hunting or via so-called pest control.
Human expansion also wiped out tigers’ habitats and prey,
forcing them into more and more isolated areas of forest until
they eventually disappeared in many places. Today tigers roam
just seven per cent of the area they once inhabited and much
of that loss has taken place in the past couple of decades.
In the early 1970s, with its Bengal tiger population down
to just 1,800, India finally acted to save its national animal.‘Seeing a tiger is a real adrenaline rush,
you’re really scared but really excited.
It’s like looking at the stars: it makes
you aware of your insignificance’
ack in April 2016, conservationists announced
a remarkable piece of news. For the first
time in more than 100 years, the number of
tigers living wild around the world was found
to be rising. Time, surely, for a roar of celebration? More like
a muted miaow. The last time populations of these biggest of
big cats were on the up, early last century, 100,000 of them
were roaming across large swathes of Asia, from Turkey to the
Russian far east. This latest rise, revealed by the World Wildlife
Fund and Global Tiger Forum, brings the estimated total to
barely 3,890 individuals, up from a low of 3,200 in 2010. That’s a
96 per cent drop over 100 years.
‘Tigers are doing well in some places,’ says Avinash Basker
of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), which has
been safeguarding the subcontinent’s fauna for more than two
decades. ‘In certain well-protected reserves in India, tigers are
thriving. But you can’t say that across all the tiger range states.’
So, while numbers are up in India – home to 70 per cent of the
world’s tigers – Russia, Nepal and Bangladesh, in some areas of
Southeast Asia they have become functionally extinct. Basker
also admits that the rise could simply be the result of improved
monitoring in India’s reserves, whose figures form the basis of
the survey. So there may not actually be more tigers surviving
to adulthood, just more tigers being counted.B
Conservation is often about
education and, in countries such
as India, the message is getting
through that tigers generate
more income alive than dead