Saving the Tigers

In the Indian state of West Bengal, very close to the easternmost corner of India, is a mangrove swamp known as the Sunderbans nature reserve. We’ve done a piece about it for World News, and I thought I should tell you a bit about it, because it’s a sobering tale about wildlife and poverty.  (The text of the story is HERE.)
The Sunderbans was believed to be the largest remaining stronghold of Bengal tigers. Western biologists say tigers’ range is seven percent of what it was a century ago. But the Sunderbans reserve was a ray of hope. Rangers there said there were 250 tigers living there. Or so they reported. The Indian Statistical Institute went in, did a more systematic count, and said the count was a bit optimistic. 250 tigers? The ISI said their census was closer to sixty. How do you miss by so much? Because, we were told, the rangers had so few resources that all they could do was count tiger paw prints–that’s right, paw prints–and extrapolate. It’s a time-honored technique in some of the world’s poorest countries, but biologists say it tends to give high estimates. Think of your own footprint–looks a bit different, depending on whether you’re walking in mud or dry sand. Even accounting for that, the rangers in West Bengal tended to count one tiger as several. Which means, says the World Wildlife Fund, that the tigers’ situation is even more precarious than they’d thought. You can accuse environmental groups, if you’re of such a mind to, of trying to get people concerned so they’ll give money. But clearly there are many things wrong in southern Asia. How to set them right in the Sunderbans reserve?  Eric Dinerstein of the WWF says the key is to "make the tigers worth more alive than dead." Today they’re hunted for their body parts–there’s a huge business in tiger parts as folk medicine in Asia. And their prey is hunted, simply because people need food. India has a growing middle class, though, which Dinerstein says might be interested in seeing nature do well. If the right parcels of land are set aside for wildlife–and if it attracts tourist money that looks more attractive to the local people than a subsistence living–then perhaps they’ll protect the tigers and the species that live around them.  So large nature preserves need to be protected, with buffer zones around them, so that people can come see the animals, and perhaps hunt them on a limited basis, without wiping them out.
But that takes resources.  And that’s a tall order, in a very poor part of the world.
(Picture: a Bengal tiger in the wild.  Copyright: WWF-Canon/Roger Hooper)