Protection, not farming, will save the tiger
By Nirmal Ghosh
INDIA’s tiger debacle has shown that small scattered
populations of tigers in fragmented forests can be killed in a matter of
weeks if protection machinery is not in place, does not function well,
or does not have political backing.
And there has been a fourth factor - local communities generally
apathetic towards wildlife conservation, if not downright hostile
because they have lost rights to free forest produce.
Asia has already permanently lost three of its original eight species
of tigers. The rest, including those in India, are sliding rapidly
towards extinction. The first to go will be the south China tiger, of
which there are less than two dozen left in the wild.
It has become clear now that India has less than 2,000 tigers left in
the wild across the entire country – fewer than the number of
people that probably gather at any given weekday lunch hour between the
Hindustan Times building on Kasturba Gandhi Marg and the Indian Oil
building a block away.
It is by far the biggest population of all Asian countries but in
historical terms a small one scattered in disparate groups, many
marooned in isolated habitat and prone to inbreeding.
Protection in tiger habitats is often on paper, and corruption
endemic not just in India but in many countries where they are found -
making them fair game.
A dead tiger can fetch up to US$ 40,000 in China, where the market is
growing because of rising affluence. Tiger parts are used for a variety
of purposes. Modern research in China itself has found tiger bones are
not very different from dog and pig bones, but the appeal of the tiger
is not based in reality, it is in the imagination of the consumer.
The global wildlife market, at around US$ 160 billion annually, is
estimated to be the third largest in the world after arms and drugs, yet
does not attract as much public attention as the first two.
A furious debate is now under way in the conservation community on how
to save Asia's remaining wild tigers.
In the process an old idea has been revived - farming tigers to flood
the market with their products, thereby driving prices down and reducing
the incentive to poach. Revenue could even be used to fund
conservation.
The problem is farming of critically endangered species has never
saved them from extinction. For example, crocodiles are farmed in
Thailand, but there are hardly any crocodiles left in the wild in that
country.
Notes professor G. Agoramoorthy, a primatologist teaching at Taiwan's
Taipei University : 'I have seen wildlife farms from south America to
south east Asia, all somehow directly or indirectly putting pressure on
the existing wild populations of endangered species.'
Debbie Banks of the London-based non-profit Environmental
Investigation Agency, which has done extensive and definitive work on
tigers, notes that traditional Chinese medicine is a global market and
the main reason for taking a tiger product is to inherit the animal's
properties.
Indeed tiger part substitutes are available in China, but that has
done nothing to dampen the demand for tiger products. In fact there is a
‘’problem’’ with fake tiger products making
money on this market.
If farm tiger products were to be legalised, instead of currently
banned worldwide under the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES), a black market would quickly develop for the
wild product.
Opening the floodgates of this market would very quickly kill off the
last remaining tigers.
There are just too few tigers around to experiment with such risky
strategies. The world is littered with examples (the most glaring of
which is poverty) of the failure of ‘’free
markets’’ to double as just regulatory and balancing
mechanisms. So-called free markets are essentially free-for-alls with
those with the most clout – political and monetary – able to
subvert the playing field at will.
Opening the floodgates of this market for the tiger, would also fail
to address the reasons why we have failed to protect it. Rather than
fixing those problems, the solutions for which are known, those in
favour of farming believe a new experiment will save the species.
'CITES has explored and rejected tiger farming as a conservation
tool on a number of occasions' says Banks.
Adam Roberts of the US-based Born Free Foundation adds 'China
instituted bear farming around 1984 with the argument...that it would
reduce pressure on wild populations.'
'The exact opposite is true. Bear farms still deplete wild
populations to stock their farms. Bears continue to be poached in the
wild, not just Asiatic bears but black bears across north America.'
The economics of poaching undermine the logic of free market
balances; it takes around US$ 2,000 a year to raise a tiger to adulthood
in captivity in passable conditions, while it takes around US$ 5-10 to
have a wild tiger killed. The black market would be hugely more
profitable than the farm product market.
Also, the logic that farm bred tigers could be used to restock wild
populations is spurious. Farm-bred tigers would likely not be able to
survive if introduced into the wild. Though they are adaptable, they are
not American bison; they are highly specialised and largely solitary
territorial predators who need to hunt, and establish and hold
territory, to stay alive.
It is a fact that local communities in countries like India have
largely seen wildlife reserves as elitist. Part of the blame lies with
conservationists and the tourist industry, who have not been able to
make an adequate case out of the fact that wild tigers sustain a huge
tourism industry which gives thousands of jobs to locals.
Millions of Dollars have been spent and scores of lives lost in the
fight to save the tiger from extinction. Thousands of tourists flock to
countries like India only to see tigers. At Thailand's infamous Sri
Racha tiger farm, which has been under investigation by the authorities
for dodgy tiger deals, thousands of tourists queue up to see bored
tigers in cages.
Such is the drawing power of the giant cat. But unless governments
seriously crack down on the illegal trade in wildlife, and sharpen
protection of tiger habitat, the big cats will, in a tragic and
irreversible irony, be hunted and eaten to extinction precisely because
of their charisma.
There have been some positive developments in India on this front,
and one can only hope they are not too little, too late. The arrest of
the notorious Sansar Chand and his associates may have put the brakes on
poaching – but only temporarily. Now the government wants to set
up a Tiger Conservation Authority and give added powers to the army in
border areas, to curb the smuggling of endangered wildlife.
But on-site protection is also critical. Essentially, when a
sought-after commodity becomes rarer and its price goes up, the methods
of exploiting and extracting it will become more sophisticated and
determined. Wildlife poaching and smuggling is run by transnational
criminal syndicates. Protection mechanisms need to be sharply enhanced
to deal with the threat.
We cannot save our remaining tigers with an on-site protection system
which is out of date. We need to fix what we have, not leave the status
quo as it is and trying risky new experiments. If we cannot manage the
basics, how are we going to manage a new set of problems?
The writer is a Trustee of The Corbett Foundation, former member of
the Steering Committee of Project Elephant, and runs the website http://www.indianjungles.com
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