[CAT] "The failing fight to save India’s tigers"

[rfmcdonald]

Stephanie Nolen's Globe and Mail article about the decline of the Indian tiger is grim. The only good news that the cat family can claim, really, is the rapid diffusion of Felis catus worldwide, to the point where the domestic housecat is unlikely to become extinct (or, more accurately, unlikely to become extinct as the result of any event that doesn't make human beings extinct, too). Cats can speciate quickly, did speciate quickly. If India's tigers go, at least the potential for new cat species is secure.

The tiger, of course, is one of the planet’s most endangered animals. Three of its nine species have been wiped out, a fourth exists only in zoos. India is ostensibly home to nearly half the world’s remaining population of some 3,200 animals. Here the tiger is the subject of a thousand years of scroll paintings, epic poems, sculpture and classical dance. They are dreaded as “man eaters” for their brutally swift ability to drag off unsuspecting farmers, but have proven little match for poisoned carcasses left out by fearful villagers, or poachers.

A century ago, when Rudyard Kipling created the scheming tiger Shere Khan, who stalked a jungle much like this one, there were an estimated 40,000 tigers in India’s forests. The government announced Monday the results of a new population estimation: 1,706 tigers. That was a gain of 12 per cent over the population counted in the same area in 2006, and included a further couple hundred tigers found in areas that had not been surveyed previously.

A jocular Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forests, announced the new numbers to a hall packed with international delegates from all the tiger-range countries, environmentalists and conservation funders such as the World Bank. “We have reason to feel satisfied with what we have done,” he said.

But even the government’s own experts expressed alarm as they announced the figures. While they say they found more tigers (through camera-trapping, radio tracking and other means) in the most sophisticated and extensive such exercise ever undertaken in the world, the amount of the country where tigers were found was found to have declined dramatically the past four years. “Tiger occupancy areas declined from 93,000 to 72,800 square kilometres and this is extremely alarming,” said Y.V. Jhala, a biologist who co-directed the census.

Also troubling: fully a third of the tigers counted are living outside the country’s 39 tiger reserves – many of them in regions with high population density – which makes it critically difficult to protect them.

While Mr. Jhala described an impressive process of forest “sampling” in nearly 30,000 different spots, the improved tiger count raised some eyebrows in the conservation community. Most of the country’s independent conservationists say the true tiger population figure is likely no higher than 1,000. “The minister and the Forest Service needed some good news today, they needed good numbers,” one environmentalist said with a shrug after the announcement. But the continual reports of tiger deaths, disappearances and clashes with humans mean the population can only be declining, these experts say.

Go, read.