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Saving the Tiger
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true – the tiger, which, in the words of the English poet William Blake, burned so bright – is threatened with extinction.?
India’s ancient culture has always striven to realise the harmony between humans and nature.It appeared to show that in six years fifty percent of the population had been lost, and there were now only 1411 Tigers in India.
India’s ancient culture has always striven to realise the harmony between humans and nature.
Today environmentalists see the threat to the Tiger as the most telling symbol of the danger the whole world faces because we have allowed ourselves to give up that struggle and to live in conflict with nature.
In the seventies India started to take the threat to the Tiger seriously. Shooting these magnificent animals, which had been the ultimate ambition of hunters, was banned, and Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger. Under the project forests were set apart as sanctuaries where the Tiger was given special protection. The number of tigers, that had fallen to just 1,800, started to rise again.
But over the years pressure from the tribal people who had lived in these sanctuaries, from business interests wanting to exploit the forests, from tourists and now most seriously from poachers have made it harder and harder to protect the tiger and their numbers are declining.
Worried by reports suggesting a decline in the tiger population officials decided that the old fashioned way of measuring the number of tigers in a sanctuary by counting pug marks or paw prints was not accurate enough. So in 2007 they mounted a survey using cameras. The result was shocking. It appeared to show that in six years fifty percent of the population had been lost, and there were now only 1411 Tigers in India.
The main demand now in illegal trade is in tiger skins, bones and other body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicines. It is controlled by organised poaching gangs who use a route from north India through Nepal and onto Tibet.
Belinda Wright, head of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, said that it was the demand from China for tiger parts which actively encourages this trade while the Chinese government does little to enforce the laws against it. “It’s not another tiger crisis, it’s the final one,” says Belinda Wright
Mark Tully in a rare interview with an actual poacher (now reformed) discovers exactly how they go about trapping and killing such dangerous animals. And he also speaks with officials whose job it is to protect the tiger.
