HOW LONG UNTIL TIGERS ARE GONE?
Not Wild: A Captive Malayan Tiger In A Zoo Swimming Pool. Photo: Hans Stieglitz
Words And Worry Won’t Stop The Endangered Cat’s Virtual Extinction In The Wild By 2020
BY PAUL GUERNSEY
Of course the tiger will never go extinct as a species. It’s actually a silly question because people are breeding them in pens like livestock in order to eat them and brew wine from their bones. Estimates of the tiger population in Chinese tiger farms stand at over 6,000 animals—double, or perhaps nearly triple, the number that are left in Asia’s shrinking, exploited, and abused wilderness areas.
The real uncertainty concerns whether there will be any endangered tigers remaining in the wild by 2020—a mere five years from now. A reasonable guess would would be that no, there won’t be wild tigers left. Not in any meaningful sense.
In 1900 there were nine tiger subspecies roaming Asia from the rainy jungles of the Indonesian islands to the icy forests of Chinese Manchuria and the Amur region of easternmost Siberia. About 100,000 of the animals existed in all. Now, just over 11 decades later, three subspecies are officially extinct: the Javan and Balinese tigers native to two of Indonesia’s islands, along with the huge Caspian tiger from the mountains of western Asia. A fourth subspecies, the South China tiger, hasn’t been seen in years. It is doubtlessly extinct, but seemingly has been “kept on the books” for political reasons. The remaining five subspecies consist of ragged remnants fast dwindling to the point at which the few mature breeding animals among them will have great difficulty finding one another.
The official number of remaining wild tigers that keeps appearing in the media and on the websites of conservation organizations is 3,200—a shockingly low figure by any standards. But even this now appears to be a sizable exaggeration.
That estimate—of “as few as” 3,200 remaining wild tigers—was agreed upon by international experts from 20 countries during a 2010 “Tiger Summit” In Russia. Since then, tiger conservationists from around the world have met regularly to talk about the need for habitat protection, resources to fight poaching, and for more tigers overall. Currently, the official goal is to “double the population of wild tigers by 2022.” Meanwhile, however, poaching, or illegal hunting, has continued unabated. Traffic, the international anti-poaching watchdog, says that an average of two tigers per week fell prey to illegal hunters between the years 2000 and 2014, with poaching since the Tiger Summit reaching “critical levels.” This means that, even if tigers are breeding fast enough to keep up with natural mortality—an extremely doubtful assumption—there would still be more than 400 fewer of them now than there were then.
But it also seems that population estimates from some of the tiger-range countries—figures that were used to support the overall population number of 3,200—may have been overly optimistic to begin with. For example, according to a new assessment released in September by the Malaysian Department of Wildlife and National Parks, there may be only between 250 and 350 Malayan tigers left in the wild, rather than the previously estimated 500 wild tigers. In addition, estimates for the Indochinese tiger in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar have stood at around 500 since at least as far back as 2010 in spite of the fact that wildlife poaching has been running out of control throughout Southeast Asia. A new “tiger reserve” in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is known not to contain a single tiger, and the largest population of Indochinese tigers—”as many as” 250—inhabits a remote area along the Myanmar-Thai border that not only is geographically close to China, but is also roamed by Chinese wildlife smugglers who travel from impoverished village to impoverished village with wads of cash with which to buy exotic animals, alive or dead. A good question might be, how many of those “as many as” tigers have not already be shot and carried off to China?
In India, the country with the most tigers, there may now be as few as 1,500 to 1,600 Bengal tigers left.
And in the Amur region of far-eastern Russia—another area hard by the Chinese border—the poaching of Siberian tigers had been accelerating again after decades of effective protection. The new, high prices apparently are making poachers more willing to risk getting caught.
In Indonesian Sumatra, where all rainforest wildlife has been under intense pressure from poaching, logging, and the razing of forests in order to create oil-palm plantations, population estimates for the Sumatran tiger have remained steady at between 400 and 500 for a suspiciously long time. How many fewer might there really be?
Finally . . . some of the smaller tiger-range countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia cite population estimates based on studies conducted years or even decades ago.
It doesn’t take a math wizard to deduce that the “3,200 tigers” figure may be too high by 20 percent or more. In other words, our remaining wild tigers doubtlessly number fewer than 3,000—and maybe as few as 2,500—individuals scattered among islands of forest that dot Asia’s oceanic vastness. They’re almost gone, and because their body parts bring such huge prices in China, Vietnam, and a few other countries where they are used to make tradition folk medicines, poachers have a large incentive for continuing to track down even these last, elusive few. And, no Chinese tiger farms will not eliminate demand for the bones and bodies of wild tigers; farm-raise tigers will only sharpen epicurean appetites for the “authentic” wild animal, while at the same time making it more difficult for law enforcers to identify illegally killed animals and prosecute their poachers.
My prediction: by 2020 tigers in the wild will consist of a few hundred of the cats in India and in Russia’s Amur region—and the human vigilance and care required to protect them and keep them from wandering “out of bounds” will have reduced them to being wild in name only. They’ll be exhibits in a handful of open-air zoos. Of course, we will continue to hear persistent rumors of tigers roaming in other places—but these will be ghost tigers, hoped for but never seen.
Meanwhile, international wildlife experts will meet regularly to discuss the need to stop habitat destruction, end poaching, and to increase the numbers of tigers in the wild.
