Talking Tigers: Part 1 of a 12-part series 

When I began intensive tiger research for our Tigers Forever book project two years back, I was shocked to learn, through a series of casual conversations, that almost no one is aware of the cat’s precarious state. When I tell people that just 3,200 tigers are left in the wild, their mouths drop. And that was last year: In discussions with some of the world’s top tiger experts over the last month, I’ve learned that the current number now may hover closer to 3,000. There are about that many captive tigers in Texas. Most of those are privately owned.

Tigers, the largest of the world’s cats, are the heart and soul of Asia’s jungles, grasslands, and deserts. They’re so adaptable that they even thrive in the frigid Himalayan foothills and the mangrove water-world of the Indian/Bangladeshi Sunderbans—and they are the dominant predator, literally the kings and queens, of every ecosystem they inhabit. But Asia’s exploding human population is eating away their forest home, and both tigers and their prey have been caught in the crosshairs, killed in vast numbers by trophy hunters and more recently, by poachers.

In just 100 years’ time, we humans have engineered their grand-scale demise.  A century ago, more than 100,000 tigers roamed across 30 nations, from Turkey eastward to Siberia, throughout Southeast Asia down to the tip of Indonesia. Today, they hang on in just 13 countries; though they’re the national animal of six nations, they’ve vanished from two of them, North and South Korea. They’ve disappeared from 93 percent of their former range; just 42  “source sites” are known, areas that conservationists say have the potential to seed tiger recovery.These sites are scattered across the continent. Half of all our wild tigers live in India.

Recently, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute analyzed the genetic vigor of tigers in a string of reserves across central India, where I just spent three weeks. One of them, Pench Tiger Reserve, is a 100-square-mile (257-square-kilometer) patch that looks like an illustration from The Jungle Book: groves of towering bamboo, big-leafed teak trees and “strangler fig” banyans filled with acrobatic langur monkeys. But Pench is essentially a leafy island. It’s hard to believe that a century ago, this was mostly unbroken forest. Today it, (like many parks, especially in India) is being squeezed by  an encroaching, teeming sea of humanity. These parks are bordered by a patchwork of rice paddies, crop fields, hemmed in by villages, cities, and all sorts of development. The surrounding land is segmented by roads, railways, scarred by massive mines and other barriers that render it dangerous and virtually impassable for these wide-ranging predators.

Researchers found that in Pench and other reserves that lacked corridors connecting them to other forests, tigers were far more inbred. Those cats had 47 to 70 percent less gene flow, and as we know from the medical history of European royalty, inbreeding does not create the healthiest bloodlines.

Tigers have lived in these lands for millennia; like all modern cats, they originated in Southeast Asia. The great roaring cats, Panthera were the first to branch off the cat family tree 10.8 million years ago. It’s a group that includes tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars and snow leopards.

The earliest tiger fossils are two million years old. That ancient ancestor eventually evolved into nine subspecies as they slowly adapted to Asia’s various landscapes, prey, and climate. Three of the nine blinked into extinction over the last 80 years. The last known Bali tiger died out during the 1930s; the Javan and Caspian tiger both disappeared in the 1970s. Six subspecies remain: the Bengal, Indochinese, Malayan, Sumatran, Amur (Siberian)—and the South-China, which is gone from the wild, existing only in captivity. All are endangered. In 1996, the Sumatran tiger was reclassified as critically endangered, one step from oblivion.

Okay, so why don’t we all know that tigers are slipping towards the edge? Part of the reason might be because we see them all the time in zoos and at the circus. But captive tigers don’t count: they’re gone from the wild gene pool and even if they could be released, they wouldn’t know how to hunt or survive outside of an enclosure and their familiarity with people would make them dangerous. And it’s nearly impossible to move a new individual into a place where tigers live. These cats are incredibly territorial and will fight to the death over their carefully delineated home territory.

Another big reason that many of us don’t realize there are so few tigers is that for the last 40 years or so, conservation organizations have loudly claimed that they’re saving them. It’s a way to keep donations rolling in. But the fact is, only a few of them are making headway in a few locations. Billions of dollars have been fundraised and spent, yet tiger numbers continue to plummet.

To save the tiger, protecting those 42 precious source sites is critical. In 2010, fully protecting those sites was estimated at a cost of $82 million a year.

Though tigers are in the emergency room, they’re a resilient species. They were nearly annihilated 73,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption at Sumatra’s Lake Toba plunged the planet into volcanic winter, wiping out scores of Asian mammals. The species rebounded from just a few individuals to repopulate Asia.

The good news: A female can birth 15 cubs in her lifetime, and there’s still enough habitat to support healthy populations.  If both the cats and their prey are given boots-on-the-ground protection, there’s hope, they’ll bounce back. But it will take committed, targeted action and creative strategies.

In the words of renowned field biologist George Schaller, “I learned long ago that conservation has no victories. It’s a never-ending process that each of us must take part in.”

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Over the next weeks, Sharon will dig into the rich cultural history surrounding this majestic cat—why they’ve been both feared and revered throughout human history—and will explore both the threats that face them and the extraordinary efforts to save them.

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Talking Tigers: Part 2 of a 12-part series

In December 2013 at the Tadoba Tiger Reserve in India, we finally got the word: Three confiscated steel-jawed poacher’s traps would be brought to the Forest Department office at one o’clock, and we’d been granted permission to film them. We grabbed our equipment and jumped in the car. The rutted, mostly-dirt roads were so bad that it would take 45 minutes to drive some seven miles to get there.

National Geographic photographer Steve Winter and I had come to Central India to shoot the short video above, Battling India’s Illegal Tiger Trade, on one of the most devastating threats facing the world’s last 3,000 wild tigers: poaching.

Tigers are walking gold, worth a fortune on the black market. The demand is huge and prices continue to skyrocket. The cats are being slaughtered across India and their entire range, mostly for their bones and their magnificent pelts. (Related: “‘Cyberpoaching’ Feared as New Threat to Rare Wildlife“)

The bones are smuggled almost exclusively to China, used in tiger bone wine—a pricey traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) tonic thought to impart the tiger’s great strength and vigor. But almost every part of the tiger is valued in TCM. Most of the skins end up in China, too, used for high-end luxury décor.

It’s rarely poor locals that are poaching tigers—it’s organized gangs. Tigers are part of a massive wildlife trade that’s run by sophisticated international crime syndicates, the same trade that’s wiping out elephants, rhinos and so many other species. It’s a 19 billion dollar a year business.

We were working in India with two of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, Belinda Wright and Nitin Desai. In 1994, Wright heard rumors that outsiders were targeting big cats in Kanha Tiger Reserve, near where she lived. Tigers she’d spent years filming for her Emmy award-winning National Geographic documentary, ‘Land of the Tiger’ were suddenly disappearing.

She figured out what was happening when a shop owner approached her in a nearby town one day. “I’ve got four fresh tiger skins. Do you know anyone who wants to buy them?” he whispered. She orchestrated a sting operation. Five people were arrested, uncovering a tiger-smuggling operation.

Later that summer, she and a friend traveled throughout the state to gauge the situation. “To my horror,” she said, “we were offered the skins and bones of 39 dead tigers, with offers in practically every city and town we investigated.” They identified 42 cat poachers and 32 dealers.

Wright abandoned her filmmaking career and founded the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), an organization she’s led ever since. Their focus: to gather information on wildlife crime—especially involving tigers—and assist enforcement authorities in arresting alleged criminals and curbing wildlife crime. (Related: “Tiger Poachers Get Stiff Sentences“)

Desai signed on in 1998. He now directs WPSI’s anti-poaching activities here in what is known as the “Central Indian Tiger Landscape.” About a quarter of the country’s 1,800 remaining Bengal tigers live here in India’s heartland, protected within a string of 13 tiger reserves. Tadoba-Andhari reserve, where we’re headed, is one of those tiger havens.

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We traveled with Wright and Desai to the Forest Department office. They told us that guards had discovered the largest of the three confiscated traps—a tiger trap—in “buffer” forest just outside Tadoba. It was a crude, rusty iron contraption, maybe a foot in diameter, with large, serrated teeth. A thick chain was attached to anchor it to the ground. Below, Nitin Desai demonstrates how poachers set their homemade jaw traps to capture tigers near the Tadoba Tiger Reserve.

It’s a common misbelief that organized tiger poachers use fancy, sophisticated weapons to kill tigers. Only organized poaching gangs use jaw traps. Tigers are rarely shot. A bullet hole ruins the skin.

Desai explained that these traps aren’t factory-made; they’re forged by a blacksmith over an open fire. From the design, he could tell that this one was made here in Central India: It was a type that had been used in the area for decades.

It took a nerve-wracking 15 minutes (with the help of a couple of guards) for Desai to pry it open and then set it, while doing his best to keep his hands out of its crushing jaws. “No tiger can escape from this trap, he said. “[It is] so strong, and so powerful.”

Then he jammed a thick branch into the trap and sprung it. It snapped shut with a sickening, metallic thud.

One trap can be reused again and again. There was no way of knowing how many tigers this hunk of metal had taken down.

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Poachers have vast knowledge of both tiger behavior and their distribution across India. Tigers that live on the edges of reserves or in adjoining forest are in the crosshairs. Poachers often work those forest fringes, targeting adults, particularly males—they get more money for their larger skins.

Poachers also know where enforcement is weakest. They pay locals for information on where and when anti-poaching patrols move through specific areas—and where tigers and their kills have been recently sighted.

Most gangs are nomadic, says Desai, striking an area and quickly moving on. They come into town in a group, often accompanied by their wives and children, who sell trinkets on the street while they’re camped there to divert attention.

They work during the dry season, placing jaw traps on trails or near water holes, often choosing full moon nights. That way, they don’t need flashlights that might give them away. Once a tiger is snared, “they do a kind of surgical strike, take down the tiger, remove the skin and bones and leave the area in about three hours,” says Desai. “They’re that fast.” The women often carry the contraband. There’s less chance of them being searched.

Except in Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India’s forest guards are not armed. Few parks have good monitoring systems or effective patrolling strategies in place. “I think it’s correct to say that except for a few—maybe four or five tiger reserves in India—no tiger is really safe,” says Wright. (Related: “A Cry for the Tiger“)

Steve and I glimpsed how WPSI tries to stop poachers before they kill—rather than having to track them afterwards. One morning, just after dawn, we went to Khutwanda, a farming village that sits on Tadoba’s doorstep. Wright, Desai, and his colleague Mukesh Bhandakkar approached a group of men who sat on a wall in the center of the village, some of them dressed in traditional dhotis. They told them of WPSI’s “secret information reward scheme,” where they would pay for tips that led to a poaching arrest. They promised anonymity, and passed out flyers listing phone numbers they could call.

WPSI also employs roaming informers who follow the movements of poaching gangs as they move around the country.

Those tips pay off. An example: Sita, a famous tigress photographed by Nick Nichols that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1997, vanished in the spring of ‘98. Four men were later arrested with bones and a skin that identified her: a tiger’s stripes are unique, like a human fingerprint. During the ensuing trial, one of the accused, Kailash Baheliya, faked a death certificate. He lived under an assumed name in another state until 2012, when he was IDed through a WPSI “reward system” informer. Now, 13 years later, he’s in jail, waiting to be tried for killing Sita—and faking his own death.

Since 2000, WPSI has assisted in over 360 cases that resulted in 892 arrests; they didn’t keep such records in their early years. The organization has amassed a wildlife crime database that’s one of the largest in the world, logging some 24,925 cases and profiles on 19,020 wildlife criminals. Most tiger killers in India are repeat offenders.

But the judicial system is overburdened, penalties are light, and wildlife crime sits low on the list of priorities. There is about a four percent conviction rate. From 1994-2013, 1,690 people were accused in tiger poaching and seizure cases; over that same period, just 69 were convicted in 25 cases. “It’s certainly not at a deterrent for anyone who wants to kill a tiger,” says Wright. “We’re following the same people again and again. Every single tiger that’s walking through India today has got a price on its head.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part three of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at India’s Kids for Tigers program.

Talking Tigers: Part 3 of a 12-part series

We pulled out of the honking pandemonium of morning traffic into the cement schoolyard of Chhotubhai Patel High School. It was only slightly quieter than the street. Hundreds of kids milled about or huddled in small groups, practicing cheers that blended into a rhythmic, unintelligible wall of sound.

Those who weren’t dressed in school uniforms sported tiger T-shirts that proclaimed “LEAVE ME ALONE” in bold type. Photographer Steve Winter and I jumped out of the car: We’d come to film this rally. Kids with painted tiger faces roared at us as we weaved through the crowd.

Shortly, 1,200 students streamed into the streets of the small central Indian city of Chandrapur, halting traffic. They screamed with deafening exuberance, so loud it echoed off the buildings. Save the tiger! Save the forest! Everyone—pedestrians, motorists, store owners—stopped to watch.

Many of the marchers carried signs and banners in English and Hindi that identified their affiliation, Kids for Tigers. These high schoolers are part of a groundswell youth movement that is now more than a million strong across the country. I had chills watching them. Despite the constant, heartbreaking news I hear almost daily about the tiger’s continuing demise, these kids inspired hope.

The program is the brainchild of Bittu Sahgal, a man who fell in love with tigers on a safari to Kanha National Park in 1973. It was the same year Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger to rescue the cat from extinction. Repeated expeditions into India’s national parks turned him into a part-time activist. He used skills he’d gained working in advertising, writing newspaper articles, and campaigning, sometimes successfully, against assaults on the land in key tiger habitats—particularly around India’s nine newly-established tiger reserves. Mines, dams, roads, chemical complexes, and other development were creeping, like mange, into tiger habitat, he said.

A campfire conversation transformed him into one of India’s most influential tiger defenders. In 1980, Sahgal asked Fateh Singh Rathore, the head of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, how he could help tigers. “Start a wildlife magazine,” Rathore said, “so that city people learn to appreciate wildlife and do less damage!” Sanctuary Asia was born 10 months later, India’s first environmental news magazine, which Sahgal still edits.

Then came Sanctuary Cub, a bi-monthly kid’s magazine, a 16-episode “Project Tiger” TV series, (which was viewed by some 30 million people), and a children’s TV series on conservation. Eventually, Sahgal was posted to high-profile government committees, where he and others who fought to protect natural resources were ignored or summarily dispatched by those pushing for big development projects. “Our advice was found unpalatable,” he said.

To fight his growing cynicism, he turned to India’s youth: In 2000, he launched Kids for Tigers. “They have the greatest legitimacy to ask for a better tomorrow,” he said. “Essentially, we wanted to give the children a voice. We wanted to explain…that you can make a difference.”

The program has created a new generation of tiger advocates through nature walks, educational films, camps, and a conservation agenda that’s been adopted by more than 500 schools in 20 cities. Kids for Tigers started in urban centers—New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore—and then branched out into smaller towns and cities like Chandrapur that border tiger reserves. “We now have a veritable army of young kids,” said Sahgal.

It’s an easy sell. This huge orange-and-black cat is deeply woven into India’s history, religion, and folklore. The Hindu goddess Durga vanquished a monster-demon while astride her ferocious mount, a tiger. Some Indians refer to the tiger as a striped water-god who creates rain and can end drought. The cat is thought to keep nightmares away and to lead lost children to safety. Pulikali dancers in Kerala, along India’s southern coast, paint themselves as tigers for an elaborate harvest festival that celebrates the cat’s power and strength. And the tiger is, after all, India’s national animal.

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We went to St. Gregorios School in Mumbai to film a Kids for Tigers school assembly. There I met 12-year-old Kush Somaiya, who was in full tiger face paint. He told me that a few years ago, before the program took him and his classmates into nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park, he’d spent little time outside of urban areas. I asked him how he liked getting out into the forest.

“First, I was not that much into nature,” he said. “But after coming with them I came to know that nature is such a beautiful thing, and what we see in nature is damned unusual and we can’t see it out in normal life or out in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai.”

He paused, then smiled. “The jungle is a gem and the thing that enhances the gem is the tiger. The tiger is the best. I love him!”

This was Sahgal’s goal: To give city kids the opportunity to fall in love with tigers and with nature, and  to teach them that we can’t save tigers without saving their home. By preserving the remaining big tracts of forest, wetlands, and jungle that tigers need to survive, he says, we’re giving them space to hunt, find  a mate, and enough land to survive catastrophic events, like floods or drought.

But he has a much larger message, one that I watched him deliver before hundreds of middle and high school kids at St. Gregorios. “If you save the tiger, you save the planet—and you save yourselves. And you guys are the voice for tomorrow, so remind the adults that…you don’t want them to destroy your world.”

He gives them a wide ecological view that few of us ever hear. Saving a forest—conservation on a grand scale—has effects that radiate outward with global implications. Those wild lands pull carbon from the atmosphere and slow climate change. They prevent erosion of the rich soil that we need to grow crops. Forests feed water into 600-plus Indian rivers and streams that run through them, watersheds that provide drinking water for millions of people.

By protecting tigers—and the top predators in any food chain—we also save the entire spectrum of life that shares their realm, preserving ecosystems that have been fine-tuned over millennia.

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Kids across India now march in the streets for tiger protection. A rally in New Delhi drew 25,000 children. They influence their parents, and they petition government officials. One year, they collected over two million signatures and delivered a truckload of them to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “Did we do this so that we would influence the Prime Minister?” Sahgal said. “Perhaps, but the real truth is that everyone who signed that letter stepped over a line. They weren’t sitting on the fence anymore. Those kids came over to our side and said, ‘Yes, we will save the tiger!’” He says they’ll continue to send letters to heads of state and other officials. “I think adults are more difficult to convince than the kids, but we have very determined kids on our side.”

A week after meeting with a delegation of these kids in 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee stood before India’s National Board of Wildlife. “Our children have woken up; why are we adults all asleep?” he asked.

Sahgal notes that 1,200 teachers are part of what he calls ‘Teachers for Tigers’. “So we have teachers on our side, we have kids on our side, we have parents on our side, we have the media on our side,” he said. “All we need now is to get a few politicians on our side so that they don’t destroy these forests before the kids take over the steering wheel.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part four of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look into the history of tiger hunting in India.

Talking Tigers: Part 4 of a 12-part series

India’s tigers have been in the crosshairs for centuries, with elite safaris dating back to the early 16th century. They rose out of Mughal Emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar’s passion for big game: He began a tradition of  royal hunting, or shikar, that was carried on by Mughal rulers until the dynasty fell in 1857. Paintings from the period depict Mongol, Rajput, Turk  and Afghan nobility hunting from elephant or horseback. These outings were considered exotic, heroic sport—and tigers were the ultimate trophies.

Staging elaborate big game hunts was also a favorite pastime for the British Raj that succeeded the Mughals, an activity that showcased their royalty, machismo, power and wealth. They took out tigers with reckless abandon, along with their Indian counterparts that ruled (nominally) sovereign “Princely States.” Kings and lords, generals, and Maharajas went out in large parties, carried by 10, 20, 30 or even 40 elephants; their servants often drugged and baited tigers before they arrived so the hunters were in little danger. They legitimized the slaughter by vilifying the cats, casting them as terrible, bloodthirsty beasts with an unquenchable desire for human flesh.

After ascending the throne in 1911, King George V and his retinue traveled north to Nepal, slaying 39 tigers in 10 days. Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale shot more than 300 tigers in India. In the 1920s, Umed Singh II, the Maharaja of Kotah, modified a flaming red Rolls Royce Phantom for tiger safaris in the Rajastani hills, outfitting it with spotlights for night hunting, a mounted machine gun and a Lantaka cannon. Newly-crowned Rewa kings in Central India thought it auspicious to slay 109 tigers after their coronation. Shooting a tiger was a coming-of-age ritual for young Indian princes.

According to historian Mahesh Rangarajan, “over 80,000 tigers…were slaughtered in 50 years from 1875 to 1925. It is possible that this was only a fraction of the numbers actually slain.” Not all were trophy-hunted: In some regions, the cats were considered vermin, systematically exterminated with incentive from government bounties.

The killing escalated after 1947. Independence ushered in a hunting free-for-all similar to the 1880s shooting spree that decimated bison herds on the American plains. Anyone who laid hands on a gun joined in. Soon after, hunters streamed in from around the world, seduced by the guaranteed premiere trophies advertised by travel agencies—tiger, elephant, rhino, lion, and other iconic species. The Maharajas created staggering new hunting records. In a letter, the Maharaja of Surguja told wildlife biologist George Schaller that by 1965, he’d bagged 1,150 tigers. Because the biggest animals made the best trophies, the largest, strongest cats disappeared from the gene pool.

And then, as models and Hollywood starlets draped themselves in cat skin coats, a fashion craze for fur took hold in the U.S. and Europe. A tiger pelt fetched $50 in India during the 1950s; 10 years later, rugs and coats sold for $10,000. When conservationist Anne Wright explored markets in Delhi—where shelves groaned with skins—she found that the vast majority lacked proper permits and were being exported illegally.

Things changed, however, when Indira Gandhi took the reins as prime minister in 1966. She became what tiger expert Valmik Thapar calls “India’s greatest wildlife savior.” She spearheaded a fight against the growing tiger crisis, outlawing the export of skins in 1969 and appointing a Tiger Task Force two years later.

At the close of the 19th century, when Rudyard Kipling penned the Jungle Book, between 50,000 and 100,000 tigers were thought to roam the Indian subcontinent; by 1971, about 1,800 were left alive and the Tiger Task Force predicted they would be extinct by the end of the century. That year, the Delhi High Court banned tiger killing, despite opposition from the trophy hunting industry that was raking in $4 million a year.

Then in 1973, Gandhi launched “Project Tiger,” which still stands as the world’s most comprehensive tiger conservation initiative. She established nine tiger reserves, hired guards to patrol them, and forcibly moved whole villages outside their perimeters.

At the time of Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, tiger numbers topped 4,000, their prey had increased, and India had created a global model for wildlife conservation. “Tigers flourished beyond our wildest dreams,” said Belinda Wright, Anne’s daughter and director of the Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

But by the late 1980s, tigers began to vanish. Rapidly. Biologists and conservationists who reported disappearances to officials were ignored. The seizure of 2,200 pounds of tiger bone (from about 80 tigers) in Delhi in August 1993 revealed what was happening: Poaching for the traditional Chinese medicine trade had hit the Subcontinent, sparking what was being called “the second tiger crisis.” To meet a growing demand for tiger parts, the cats were being poisoned, shot, and snared across India.

Meanwhile, wildlife wardens and Project Tiger officials dismissed the warnings, clinging to inflated population numbers based on flawed data. Their 2002 census counted a whopping 3,642 tigers. They estimated populations from paw prints, an unreliable method known to re-count the same cats multiple times.

But the scandal went public in June 2004 when national headlines proclaimed the unthinkable: Not a single tiger survived in Sariska Tiger Reserve, despite government claims that 18 tigers lived there. When three men were later arrested, they described how easy it was to kill them: Many of the guard’s walkie-talkies were nonfunctional and none of the 300 guards were at their posts during monsoon season. The poachers had even brought in live bait and shot tigers over their kills.

Project Tiger had become, as Valmik wrote, “a success story gone horribly wrong.” A 2006 auditor’s report found the project riddled with corruption and neglect. Funds had been skimmed by state governments for other purposes. Guards that quit or retired were not replaced; 30 percent of posts were vacant and the average ranger was over 50 years old. Those that remained walked dangerous patrols armed with bamboo sticks or ancient Lee-Enfield rifles—50 year-old British Army-issue weapons, outgunned by poachers toting assault rifles or AK-47s. Ultimately, the embarrassment over extinction in Sariska prompted the creation of a new entity, the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The Wildlife Institute of India’s grim 2008 report shocked India and the world with its findings: A far more accurate camera trap survey counted just 1,411 adult tigers—after a $400 million investment over 34 years to save them under Project Tiger. Two years later, a wider census raised tiger estimates to 1,706.

Today there are 45 tiger reserves, comprising about one percent of India’s land. Some hold only a handful of tigers. “Just creating reserves is not a magic wand,” says Deborah Banks, an investigator with the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency. “We still need people, resources, and the political will to protect them.”

Poaching continues to skyrocket, and over the last thee years, tiger deaths (from all causes) have been high: 71 in 2011, an all-time record of 88 in 2012, and 80 in 2013.

A new census is currently underway. India and the world awaits the results: The country is home to over half of all remaining wild tigers.

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part five of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll explore Asian cultures’ “cult of the tiger”–how tigers have been an iconic symbol of power and courage, woven into culture, religion, folklore and ritual throughout human history.

Talking Tigers: Part 5 of a 12-part series

Throughout human history, the diverse peoples who populated the vast Asian continent have had one thing in common: They feared and revered the tiger. Throughout this cat’s range, their stealthy, illusory habits—suddenly appearing and disappearing in dense forests, often at night—elevated them to the status of otherworldly beings.

For millennia, the largest of the world’s cats has been an iconic symbol of power and courage, woven into culture, religion, folklore and ritual. Teeth, claws and other body parts became amulets. In legend, tigers brought food to men and women lost in the forest; tigers fought the forces of evil, protecting tribes, holy men, babies; tigers acted as a potent agent of fertility—and provided passage between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Nine tiger species once roamed from Siberia’s boreal forests southward to the steamy tropical jungles of Indonesia, and from present-day Turkey all the way to the East China Sea. The earliest fossil, a tiger-like skull unearthed in China, is two million years old.

Neolithic cave paintings are the earliest existing depictions, etched into rock walls across the Indian subcontinent 8,000 years ago and in China’s Helan Mountains; the oldest surviving tiger statue was sculpted in China some 1,000 years later.

Tribal cultures everywhere deified this cat, and it’s no wonder. This magnificent animal is the reigning predator across its range, huge, muscular, possessing fearsome teeth and claws and a roar that resounds for miles. Tigers radiate power. They inspire awe.

That reverence has taken many forms. For the Chinese, the tiger represents the masculine and rules over all the world’s creatures, literally marked by royalty: The four stripes on its forehead form the character wáng, meaning king. The Tibetans believed that tigers held the key to immortality. The Koreans considered them messengers sent by a venerated mountain spirit that appears in paintings as an elderly, white-bearded man—accompanied by a tiger. The Naga tribes in Myanmar and India believed that man and tiger are brothers, one human, the other striped.

For many tribes, killing the beast was an unforgivable sin.

Shaman in many countries invoked tigers to move between worlds in order to communicate with the dead. Accounts from the early 1900s describe “were-tigers” in Sumatra, people who transformed into tigers at nightfall and shape-shifted back into human form at sunrise.

Morphing into a tiger seemed to be a common occurrence across Asia. In India, were-tigers were evil sorcerers, in China were-tigerhood was considered a hereditary curse, and in Thailand, rampaging man-eaters were thought to be angry were-tigers. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the harimau jadian (benevolent were-tigers) that guarded plantations were only dangerous if they were hungry.

The transformation from human to striped feline is described in various fables: It usually began with the feet turning into enormous paws, equipped with sharp, sheathed claws. Legs and arms, chest and back expanded, rippled with muscle, and then the skin was blanketed in russet fur, slashed by black stripes. A tail appeared between the man-cat’s long rear legs. Finally, an enormous tiger head appeared. Back in human form, these people appeared normal, except for one tell-tale physical anomaly: They lacked a groove in their upper lip.

Tigers were widely believed to carry the spirits of the ancestors. Captain Henry Bandesson, who traveled in Annam (modern-day Vietnam) at the turn of the 20^th century, recounted a case where a woman was killed by a tiger that was thought to be inhabited by the soul of her dead, cuckolded husband—and acts of infidelity in her village instantly became very rare.

But tigers were most commonly worshipped as powerful protectors. Many believed that when a tiger slayed a human, their soul entered the animal’s body, transforming it into an everlasting protector that would forever watch over them in time of crisis—so few dared to kill them, even the man-eaters. The Javan tiger, before it went extinct in 1980, guarded the Tree of Life.

Indian mythology is filled with tigers: the tiger fights dragons, brings rain in time of drought, brings babies to the childless and then keeps those children safe from nightmares, and has the ability to heal. In a creation story from the northeast state of Nagaland, the mother of the first spirit, the first tiger and the first man emerged from the earth together through a pangolin’s den.

But worship continues to this day: Vaghadeva, the tiger god, is honored as guardian of the forest, propitiated with offerings of flowers and incense placed on simple rock shrines. In Central India, the Baigas, or Tiger Clan, consider themselves the cat’s descendants. North of Mumbai, the Warli tribe erects wooden tiger statues for use in fertility rites: At harvest time, they decorate them with images of entwined snakes, trees, the moon, stars and the sun—and donate part of the year’s harvest to the tiger as a symbol of life and regeneration.

These cats also watched over the dead. As far back as the 13^th century in China, tiger imagery was etched into tombs and monuments to ward off the malevolent spirits that tormented the deceased. In Chinese folk tales, the cat killed the evil and guarded the good. And in pre-colonial Indochina, the forest-dwelling Moi people endowed them with supernatural powers that required extreme deference: They called the cat ‘his eminence’, ‘lofty one’, ‘the master’, ‘my lord’, or ‘the gentlemen’—but never ‘tiger’.

Bandesson also discovered a belief that the soul of a tiger’s victim is carried around on the tiger’s back—and they carry deities, too. The warrior Hindu goddess Durga, slayer of demons, rides a massive tiger. A tiger helped Chang Tao-Ling (who’s considered the founder of Taoism) to vanquish the king of the demons and amass enough power to ascend to heaven; he, too, rode a tiger.

In art, tigers have been depicted with wings or drawn conjoined with a streaking white star amidst the Milky Way, protecting Earth from above. With their ancient legacy as givers of life, mediums, gods, and guardians, it’s no surprise that for millennia, medicine men of the East have imbued tigers and their parts with untold healing properties. It’s a belief system that has proven deadly, with growing demand for tiger parts pushing tigers towards the brink of extinction.

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part six of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll report on the use of tigers as part of the ancient traditional Chinese medicine apothecary.

Talking Tigers: Part 6 of a 12-part series

For centuries, tigers have inspired awe, reverence and sometimes, terror, in the humans they’ve lived beside. They command the Asian landscape as the top predator—immense, magnificent, muscular animals armed with razored claws and massive canines. They can kill with one swipe of their dinner plate-sized paws or with a strangling bite to the throat of their victim. But they also shimmer with radiant, auburn beauty in the sunlight; sometimes they seem to materialize out of nowhere, hunting under a blanket of night or appearing suddenly from a stand of bamboo, silently stalking their prey at dawn or dusk, shrouded by ghostly mists or by failing light, the jungle’s apparition.

With this great power and mystery, tribal cultures worshipped tigers, bestowing them with powers that extend far beyond those of any worldly creature. Tigers became gods—and healers. For millennia, medicine men have ascribed magical powers and medicinal properties to them, and somehow, this cat became a universal apothecary. Many believe (and some still do) that by ingesting it, you absorb an animal’s life force, its vigor, strength, and attributes.

Nearly every part of this cat, from nose to tail ‎ (eyes, whiskers, brains, flesh, blood, organs and more) has been used to treat a lengthy list of maladies. Tiger parts are purported to heal the liver and kidneys, to cure everything from epilepsy, baldness, toothaches, joint pain and boils to ulcers, nightmares, fevers, and headaches. They’re also used to treat rat bites and laziness and are thought to prevent possession by evil demons. Tiger penis is said to have aphrodisiac powers.

The hu gu (Mandarin for bones) are the parts that are most highly prized in Oriental medicine, a favored treatment for rheumatism and arthritis—and for impotence and flagging libido. But the humerus is the most coveted section of a tiger skeleton: That upper front leg bone is believed to contain the most potent healing powers.

Once they’re stripped of flesh, the bones are ground into powder, then used in pills, plasters, and as part of remedies containing other ingredients. A standard oral dosage for rheumatic pain is three to six grams a day. Over a year, that’s somewhere between six and a half and 13 pounds of bone—which is also used in wine.

There is a growing, clamoring demand for tiger bone wine, a tonic made by steeping a tiger carcass in rice wine to produce an extremely expensive elixir. It’s thought to impart the animal’s great strength, a status symbol product bought or gifted by the elite: government officials, military officers, and wealthy businessmen.

Although China banned the use of tiger bone in 1993 and removed it from the list of approved medicines, manufacture and sale of tiger bone wine never stopped. Labels may picture a tiger,  bottles may be tiger-shaped, but the word “tiger” has disappeared from packaging, replaced by “lion” ingredients—or it’s called “bone-strengthening wine.” Without DNA tests on any bone bits that might have remained in the liquid, there’s no way to know what exactly it’s made from, but ongoing media reports coming out of China document dealers offering tiger bone wine to customers.

Some of these are ancient remedies prescribed for well over 1,000 years—some say traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originated perhaps as long as 5,000 years ago. According to legend, as human civilization emerged, Heaven sent a number of “sage-kings” to teach the people how to survive in a hostile world. One of these sage kings, Shen Nong Shi (3000 B.C.), created medicine by ingesting plants and discovering which served as drugs. As Chinese medical practice evolved, circulation of qi—energy—became  paramount, along with balance of yin and yang, the opposite principles in nature, and a focus on the function and the intricate relationships between five organs: kidneys, lungs, liver, heart, and spleen.

TCM ingredients include a wide range of plants, herbs, minerals, and parts from over 1,500 animals, including tigers and other endangered species—more than 6,000 substances in all. Demand for some of the most highly prized items, including rhino horn, pangolin scales, and tiger parts, has nearly hunted these creatures off the planet. The first reference in China to tiger bone medicine dates to 500 A.D., published in the Collection of Commentaries on the Classic of the Materia Medica. 

The appetite for animal parts used in TCM skyrocketed in tandem with China’s expanding industrialization in the 1980s. As the country’s population approached 1.2 billion, newfound wealth and greater spending power fueled the demand as interest in traditional cures resurged: Their use garnered prestige.

Initially, tiger parts came from  huge local stockpiles. In 1950, some 4,000 South China tigers roamed the country; but at the end of that decade, as part of the People’s Republic of China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong declared the cats to be one of the four pests that threatened progress. He organized and championed eradication campaigns, and within a few years, just 1,000 remained. The remaining  population dwindled and ultimately crashed.  A  South China tiger has not been spotted by biologists or government officials in the wild for over 35 years.

China’s stockpiles of tiger ingredients eventually ran low and beginning around 1986, the cats began to mysteriously disappear elsewhere. Professional poachers fanned out, shooting, snaring, and trapping their way across tiger range. India was a prime target, with close proximity to China—which is still, by far, the largest consumer of tiger parts and at the time, was the largest manufacturer and exporter of medicines containing tiger derivatives. In 1986, China’s People’s Daily newspaper reported that 116 factories were producing medicinal wine.

Poachers targeted locations where corruption was rife, enforcement weak, and where there were few other economic opportunities. They hired locals to hunt the cats or act as guides, then ran the parts and pelts over borders to Chinese TCM manufacturers and dealers. A huge pipeline was shipping wildlife to East Asia, especially China, the trade run by international crime syndicates—and driven by monstrous, staggering economics.

But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that field biologists and conservationists realized that TCM was responsible for what had become a precipitous decline in tiger numbers. It was a shocking seizure of tiger and leopard bones in Delhi, India in 1993 that revealed the severity of the threat and the mushrooming trade: 882 pounds of tiger and leopard bones (about 30 animals’ worth), eight tiger skins and 43 leopard skins. A Tibetan refugee arrested in the sting had agreed to supply an undercover agent with 2,200 pounds of bones—about 80 tigers.

Tigers were classified as globally endangered in 1986. The following year, a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) treaty banned cross-border trade in tiger parts. From 1990 to 1992, China exported some 27 million units of tiger medicines and wine to 26 countries, according to TRAFFIC, a nonprofit that documents illegal wildlife trade. Tiger remedies were seen in pharmacies in Asian communities all over the world.

China formally banned domestic trade of tiger bone in 1993. The next year, some Chinese medical practitioners publicly repudiated the use and efficacy of tiger remedies; today, very few pharmacies still openly carry remedies containing tiger products. But the market slipped underground and shadowy networks still thrive. Though tiger hunting is illegal everywhere, the killing has continued, and in some places, it’s accelerated.

Prices for tigers, dead or alive, continue to soar as populations collapse. Poaching for their bones (and skins) has become a primary threat to their survival.

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A partial list of traditional medicine uses for tiger parts: 

Bile: Used to treat convulsions in children

Blood: Used to strengthen the constitution and build willpower

Bone: Used as an anti-inflammatory to arthritis, rheumatism, back problems, general weakness, or headaches; also considered a powerful tonic

Brain: A treatment for laziness and pimples

Claws: A sedative for sleeplessness

Eyeballs: A treatment for malaria and epilepsy, nervousness or fevers in children, convulsions and cataracts

Fat: Prescribed for dog bites, vomiting, hemorrhoids

Feces: A cure for boils, hemorrhoids and alcoholism

Flesh: Used to treat nausea and malaria, to bring vitality and tone the stomach and spleen

Feet: Used to ward off evil spirits

Fur: Is burnt to drive away centipedes

Nose leather: Used to treat bites and other superficial wounds, for epilepsy and children’s convulsions

Penis: Used as an aphrodisiac or love potion

Skin: Used to cure fever caused by ghosts and mental illness

Stomach: Prescribed for stomach upsets

Teeth: Prescribed for rabies, asthma, and genital sores

Tail: Used to cure skin diseases

Whiskers: Used to treat toothaches

(Source: KILLED FOR A CURE: A Review of the Worldwide Trade in Tiger Bone.)

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up:  In In part seven of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll report on the demand that’s feeding tiger poaching.

Talking Tigers: Part 7 of a 12-part series

Young, healthy tigers jump through rings of fire, sit upright on cue, clawing at the air, and perform other well-choreographed circus tricks. Enthusiastic crowds cheer. After the show, some pay extra to hold small, cuddly cubs. 

But those who visit these tiger attractions in China have no idea of the suffering behind the scenes or the dark commerce that keeps them afloat.

If they were to slip behind the scenes, they’d see concentration-camp level suffering. Huge numbers of tigers are crammed into barred, concrete quarters or packed into dusty, treeless compounds behind chain link fences. Most of the cats are gaunt, wasted to striped skin and bone. Some are grossly deformed by inbreeding or poor nutrition. Some are blind.

Tiger Farms

Many of these operations are run as tourist destinations—and may masquerade as conservation initiatives—but these facilities are essentially factories that breed tigers for the commercial sale of their parts.

The country’s 200 or so “tiger farms” are working overtime to meet a new, growing market: Tiger products have become coveted status symbols among China’s elite, much like sporting a Rolex watch or serving a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

Tiger farms are supplying a shadowy underground trade, which “serves only to stimulate consumer demand, creating a massive enforcement challenge and wholly undermining the efforts of the international community to protect tigers,” says Shruti Suresh, a wildlife campaigner with the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency.

A tiger carcass is now worth a small fortune. With just 3,000 tigers (from six different subspecies) left in the wild, this luxury market could be the death knell for wild tigers.

Buying or gifting expensive tiger products has become a fashionable way to gain favor or flaunt wealth and power among China’s most influential people, a group that reportedly includes wealthy businessmen, government officials and military officers. China is, by far, the largest consumer of tiger and many other endangered species parts.

It’s created a growing clamor for tiger pelts that are used in high-end décor and for tiger bone wine, made by marinating a tiger skeleton in rice wine—which can sell for $500 a bottle. Tiger meat is sometimes served at fashionable dinner parties where guests may have been treated to a “visual feast” before eating: watching their entrée killed and butchered before them.

For decades, tiger derivatives used in traditional Chinese medicine drove the black market trade. Today, tiger parts are “consumed less as medicine and more as exotic luxury products,” according to a recent report. “ ‘Wealth’ [is] replacing ‘health’ as a primary form of consumer motivation,” it says. With tigers and other Asian big cats rapidly disappearing, the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) commissioned the report for review at a Standing Committee meeting in Geneva last July.

This current enterprise isn’t about upholding sacred cultural tradition. Nor is it providing necessary medical treatment, says Lixin Huang, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

It’s simply about money, influence and speculation.

Industrial-scale tiger farming makes millions of dollars for a handful of people. Some speculators are collecting tiger skin rugs and cases of tiger bone wine (vintage brewed from wild tigers is most valuable), watching their investment grow as the numbers of wild tigers dwindle. They’re banking on extinction.

Meanwhile, tiger farming is a booming business. About twice as many tigers are living miserable, caged lives in China as  all of the world’s remaining wild tigers put together. The country’s captive tiger population has skyrocketed from about 20 in 1986 to between 5,000 and 6,000 today. (Three other countries also farm tigers, but on a radically smaller scale. Vietnam is thought to hold 127, Lao PDR, 400, and Thailand, 1,000. They, too, trade illegally in tigers.)

Captive tigers are not insurance against extinction: they in no way help wild populations. They’re badly interbred and a tiger raised by humans has never been successfully reintroduced to the wild.

“A lot of biologists view farmed tigers as already dead because they have nothing to do with conservation,” says Judy Mills, author of the forthcoming book “Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species.”

Industrial breeding facilities, “speed-breed” to boost production: mothers usually birth two to three cubs; if they’re promptly taken from her, she can bear another litter in as little as five months.  Just one breeding center, the Heilongjiang Siberian Tiger Garden in northeast Heilongjiang Province, is expecting 100 cubs to be born over the coming year.

The largest of these, the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village in Guilin, held about 1,500 tigers at last count in 2010. Seed financing came from China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) when it launched in 1993. Ironically, this agency both enforces wildlife protection—and promotes farming of endangered species.

Tiger farming is legitimate business, sanctioned under a 1989 law that encourages breeding and utilization of wildlife. Sales of tiger bone and other tiger parts were, in theory, banned in 1993. However, it seems that commercial tiger breeding facilities are essentially skin and bone farms.

At July’s CITES Standing Committee meeting, Chinese officials finally admitted what the world has known for some time: they are licensing sales of tiger pelts. In 2013, EIA revealed that legally-issued permits are regularly reused, making it disturbingly easy to launder skins from tigers killed in India and elsewhere. In addition to selling pelts, many tiger farms stockpile frozen carcasses—and brew tiger bone wine from their skeleton supply.

But it’s even worse than that. A factory in Changsha appears to be cranking out tiger bone wine. EIA investigators discovered that the Hunan Sanhong Biotechnology Company in Changsha is apparently manufacturing “Real Tiger Wine” on a commercial scale. Evidence suggests that the State Forestry Administration and other agencies secretly authorized the venture—and sales are not public: regional agents distribute directly to elite clients, including restaurants and guesthouses catering to high-ranking government officials.

The recent CITES report corroborates this. “Internal trading privileges” are allowed for companies dealing in tiger skins and body parts “produced mainly but not exclusively from captive breeding,” it says.

Exactly how many tigers it takes to supply a wine factory—and China’s luxury market—is anyone’s guess. But this illegal enterprise could not be thriving if government officials were not involved, invested, benefitting—or turning a blind eye. It’s become a national embarrassment for China, flying in the face of efforts by President Xi Jinping to root out corruption.

Despite claims that they have completely curbed international trafficking, the country has done little to disrupt the crime networks that control the illegal transnational trade in tiger parts—or to eliminate the nation’s voracious appetite for tiger parts and products, says Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

Wildlife trafficking, now valued at about $19 billion a year, has traditionally ranked low on most governments’ list of priorities. But the ongoing massacre of elephants and rhinos has grabbed headlines and sparked action. (Though fewer tigers are being killed, there are far less left to kill—and they hover closer to extinction.)

An international summit in London in January brought together ministers and heads of state from 50 nations to galvanize a global fight against wildlife crime. They signed a declaration stating that, “Poaching and trafficking undermines the rule of law and good governance, and encourages corruption. It is an organised and widespread criminal activity, involving transnational networks.”

In 2013, Achim Steiner, who heads the United Nations Environment Program, called for a global crackdown, and the U.N. Security Council, General Assembly and other U.N. bodies have taken notice. Interpol is now leading global enforcement operations.

Large conservation organizations claim to be be saving tigers, but the fact is that numbers continue to plummet—and the Chinese demand for tiger products is wiping them out faster than any other threat.

Tiger experts agree that without urgent action to phase out tiger farms and end all commerce in tigers from all sources, wild tigers will disappear—and soon.

WildAid, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that combats illegal wildlife trade, says it very succinctly, with film stars Jackie Chan and Jiang Wen speaking up for tigers. Their message is broadcast in public service announcements, posted on billboards and Tweeted across social media: “When the buying stops, the killing can, too.”

For more information: Check out the July 2014 report,                                                            “Caged Assets: Tiger Farming and Trade.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up:  In part eight of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll share new information on a threat to one of the most endangered tiger subspecies–the Siberian tiger.

Talking Tigers: Part 8 of a 12-part series

The first signs that something was wrong came in 2000. Gaunt Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) began wandering through villages and staggered haltingly across roads in Russia’s Far East. They were dazed, hungry and boldly unafraid of humans, extremely odd behavior for this secretive, wary animal.

One of them was a skinny tigress named Galia, an animal that researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society had outfitted with a satellite collar. After several failed attempts to capture her, she was shot by police. Her three cubs were discovered nearby, dead. She’d been too sick to hunt, and had stumbled into a town to grab a cow, a pig, a dog, any easy prey to feed her starving family. Galia was the fourth collared study animal that the biologists lost that year. All of them died under puzzling circumstances.

Autopsies revealed the presence of some type of morbillivirus, a family of highly contagious viruses that infect people, dogs, and wildlife. (The word derives from morbus, meaning plague.) But it wasn’t until last year that US and Russian scientists conclusively identified the culprit: canine distemper virus (CDV), a close relative of human measles.

Now, with new outbreaks biologists and wildlife managers are trying to assess the scope of the threat. The Siberian (or Amur) tiger, the largest of the big cats, is one of the six remaining tiger subspecies and one of the most endangered. Somewhere between 250 and 400 are thought to still roam the lushly forested Sikhote-Alin mountains in southeast Siberia, its last real stronghold. (Current population numbers are expected in 2015 as part of a new global tiger census.)

These cats are in the emergency room, so investigating the origins and prevalence of the virus is crucial for future conservation efforts. CDV is a promiscuous pathogen that readily jumps between animal species and typically kills about half its victims. Like many viruses, it causes diarrhea, fever, dehydration, and can progress into pneumonia.

But it sometimes sparks more deadly symptoms in tigers that explain infected cats’ uncharacteristic actions: it can cause brain swelling and neurological problems. Researchers reported that at least 1 percent of the Amur tiger population succumbed to  the disease from 2009 to 2013. But even those that survive are at risk: impaired tigers that have lost their fear of humans can easily be shot by poachers or killed by locals who are concerned over safety.

The virus is suspected to have caused the deaths of thousands of Caspian seals during outbreaks in 1988 and 2000; it nearly exterminated the black-footed ferret and has decimated Africa’s wild dog populations.

Researchers had long believed that cats were resistant. Although domestic cats could be infected in the laboratory, they didn’t get sick or transmit the virus to others. But then, in 1994, CDV  hit Serengeti lions. The epidemic took down about a third of the population, killing about nearly 1,000 animals in one deadly swoop—as well as a huge number of leopards, bat-eared foxes, and hyenas.

Amur tigers have already been brought back from the brink once. They once roamed across the entire Russian Far East, the Korean peninsula, and northern China. But by the 1940s, both they and their prey had been nearly hunted out: maybe 40 survived.

Russia became the world’s first country to fully protect tigers, and by the 1980s, the population had rebounded to about 500. That recovery, however, was short-lived. A deadly confluence of events brought a new flood of illegal hunters to the region: the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian economy later crashed, and China’s insatiable demand for tiger parts grew and tigers became a high-priced commodity. These well-armed hunters are a new breed, often linked to international crime syndicates that smuggle endangered wildlife.  Tigers are the top prize, but poachers also target the tiger’s prey: deer, boar, and elk, leaving them little to eat.

With sparse prey living in this northern temperate landscape, Siberian tigers need immense territories to survive; large scale illegal logging is whittling away its forest home and impacting its prey, which feed on these trees when the land is blanketed in snow. (A female needs at least 175 square miles to feed her and her cubs, drastically larger than India’s Bengal tigers that need just eight square miles because food is abundant.)

At least one-third of all Russian timber exports are illegal; the US is the top importer of these hardwoods; and logging in the Amur tiger’s range has more than doubled since 2000, according to a World Wildlife Fund report. And then there’s the land that’s been cleared to make way for agriculture, expanding towns, roads, mines and other development.

It’s created small, isolated tiger populations that are less likely to survive CDV, according to a study published last month in the journal PLOS. Using computer modeling, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, University of Glasgow, and other institutions found that tigers that living in areas that held were roughly 55 percent more likely to die out within the next 50 years.

This cat still carries the legacy of their near-extinction. A genetic analysis of 95 Siberian tigers published in Molecular Biology found that the gene pool had constricted dramatically. So much so that one of the authors, Michael Russello of the University of British Columbia, said that the population is behaving as if it were the size of 27 to 35 individuals. Because they are such tiny populations, losing even a few animals, can further bottleneck their already low genetic diversity, making them more susceptible to disease.

“This might just be enough to push them over the edge,” said University of Nottingham veterinary virologist Rachael Tarlinton.

Biologists can’t stave off an epidemic if they don’t know the source. Siberian tigers catch CDV when they eat infected animals, but which ones? Domestic dogs are of greatest concern, but  raccoon dogs, foxes, and other local animals also harbor the disease.

If dogs are indeed the main carrier, it will require a blitzkreig vaccination effort. Inoculating tigers with an injected vaccine is impossible.

Protecting remaining forest is another antidote, according to the authors of the PLOS study. “In lieu of a practical means of delivering [canine distemper virus] vaccines to wild tigers, the most viable strategy to ensure their conservation is the maintenance of large connected populations within protected areas that buffer the effects of local declines,” they wrote.

The situation is quite serious, said McAloose. “It’s the first infectious disease that we know is a significant risk to Amur tiger survival.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

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Next up:  In part nine of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at a new study on the tiger trade in Myanmar’s border towns.

Talking Tigers: Part 9 of a 12-part series

A decades-long investigation found that the illicit trade in tigers and other wild cats has been nearly shut down in Tachilek—a frontier town in eastern Myanmar—most likely because of heightened security across the border in Thailand. But the situation in Mong La, a lawless Burmese city on the Chinese border, is radically different. Over the past eight years, the number of shops selling cat parts and products has more than tripled. 

This new report from TRAFFIC,  an organization that monitors the global wildlife trade, confirms that Mong La is a major hub funneling wildlife products into China. Their findings illustrate the success of a boots-on-the-ground fight against trafficking—and show how lack of enforcement allows crime to flourish. The data was published in the journal Biological Conservation.

This study began when Chris Shepherd, who now heads TRAFFIC’s Southeast Asia office, first visited Tachilek in the 1990s. The streets were lined with shops selling a staggering array of wildlife products. Tiger pelts hung on the walls. Tiger and leopard skulls, claws, and teeth, along with the skins of many small and large felines lined glass cases and were displayed on tables beside the bones, horns and antlers of an astonishing number of species.  Many of the animals being sold there, including all wild cats, are protected under an international treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Tachilek has been a well-known center for buyers and smugglers for decades. Myanmar is a major opium producer—number two, behind Afghanistan—and Thai border towns have been key transit points since World War II. Tachilek,  “the Capital of the Golden Triangle,” is home to drug lords who use the same routes to trade in heroin, guns, women—and illegal wildlife.

Shepherd and others returned periodically over the next 22 years, conducting 19 surveys from 1991 to 2013. They carefully tallied and photographed the cat products offered for sale. Over tea, they chatted with dealers who boasted about customers who poured in from Thailand, Taiwan, and all over Asia to buy their goods. They had nothing to fear. Enforcement was weak on the Thai side of the border, and virtually nonexistent in Tachilek.

By the turn of the millennium, tiger numbers had dwindled to somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. With greater media scrutiny, sellers grew cagey. They no longer spoke openly or allowed pictures. Some hid their wares, only pulling them out for prospective buyers. Slowly, the wildlife market all but died. The 35 shops that sold cat merchandise in 2000 shrank to just six last year. “I think this speaks volumes for the power of raising awareness,” says Shepherd. “Putting issues like this in the spotlight is essential.”

A similar survey launched in Mong La in 2001. It’s a city that was carved from dense jungle in Myanmar’s remote northeastern Shan state to become the capital of Special Region No. 4. This semi-autonomous area is run by the rebel National Democratic Alliance Army, the military arm of the Kokang, a Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese ethnic group.

Mong La is a seedy, Burmese version of Las Vegas with little rule of law. It runs on gambling, prostitution, money laundering—and a thriving commerce in rare wildlife that caters to clients from China.

In 2006, six shops carried wild cat parts and derivatives. But since then, value and demand have spiked, driven by China’s legal trade in tiger skins and a clamor for tiger bone wine; though the sale of tiger bone is illegal in China, officials turn a blind eye. Earlier this year, 21 shops were trading in cats.

The study’s authors, Shepherd and Oxford anthropology professor Vincent Nijman, say that the increase in cat trade in Mong La correlates with the burgeoning buying power of China’s consumers—and the seeming ease of smuggling across this rather porous border. Traffickers have little fear of being stopped.

The city’s huge outdoor “wet market” sells animals brought in overnight, everything from cats and slow loris to bear cubs, birds and deer, anything that local hunters can get their hands on. It’s a morning market where proprietors slaughter animals on the spot for customers who come for meat or fresh skins.

Then there are high-end shops scattered across the city that handle luxury goods: ivory and hippo teeth from Africa, helmeted hornbills from Indonesia, Tibetan antelope heads, rhino horn—and extremely expensive tiger pelts. “Clearly this [boutique trade] is targeted at some serious players,” says Shepherd.

The bones are the priciest part of the tiger. They were rarely seen during surveys in Mong La, probably because they are in such high demand.

For those who wish to dine on wildlife after a visit to a  casino or a brothel, there are numerous establishments filled with an almost unimaginable variety of caged animals. Many of these restaurants boast huge glass tanks of wine with whole tiger skeletons floating inside. Others advertise tiger bone wine by hanging tiger skins on the walls. If you wanted to order tiger meat, you could probably get it, Shepherd says grimly.

Serious quantities of wildlife are consumed in town, but a lot is also being smuggled out. Mong La is one of Asia’s largest open wildlife markets, says Shepherd, and “it’s clearly a major facilitator for cross-border tiger trade.” You can buy just about anything, at any time. But he notes that some dealers are quite guarded about selling tiger parts. “There’s no one there who doesn’t know that it’s illegal.”

Where the tigers are coming from is anyone’s guess. Dealers have consistently claimed that most of their cat merchandise was hunted locally, though some tigers were being smuggled from India. Previous studies in Tachilek traced big cat skins and bones to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Smaller cats like clouded leopards and Asiatic golden cats still hang on in Myanmar, but very few tigers remain. They’ve been heavily hunted, originally as vermin, later as trophies. Whole swathes of their forest habitat have been leveled.  The volume of wild pigs, muntjac deer, and other game species being traded in Mong La is alarming; without food, there are no tigers. What’s even more disturbing is that many deer species in Southest Asia have become so hard to find that they’ve completely disappeared from the markets. Stopping the tiger trade without stopping the trade in their prey is short-sighted, says Shepherd. “It’s a whole package.”

Borders are often defined by rivers, mountains or natural bottlenecks, places where enforcement can have a real impact. But wildlife trafficking is low on the list of priorities for border officials. The Thai side of the Tachilek border is well-manned, and officials fill big containers with confiscated wildlife. It clearly shows that enforcement can be a deterrent.

Because Mong La is in a “non-government” region, a crackdown on the Myanmar side of the border is unlikely, so Chinese authorities need to be encouraged to act. “If people can’t take wildlife across the border, it’ll strangle this market,” says Shepherd. “You can argue that they’ll just move somewhere else; so then you go shut it down there. Any crime is like that. You have to keep chasing it, crushing it wherever it pops up.”

The key to saving tigers and all wildlife, he says, is threefold. First off, reducing demand and proper enforcement of wildlife laws is crucial. Secondly, we need to make the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species work: CITES regulates that trade under a treaty signed by 180 nations. “If countries were held accountable for their commitments to the convention, and implemented and enforced CITES, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now,” says Shepherd.

Currently, that’s not happening. Most countries in Southeast Asia—including major wildlife trading countries such as Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia—don’t have adequate wildlife protection laws on the books, despite the fact that all parties are obliged to have a legal structure in place that makes CITES enforceable.

Lastly, Shepherd says that  in order to save wildlife, society as a whole must care. It requires a populace that frowns on those who use threatened species as meat or trophies, that understands conservation issues, that doesn’t want to witness a mass extinction.

Without public support, there won’t be adequate pressure to pass necessary legislation or to increase enforcement efforts. In China and elsewhere, celebrities and athletes are raising awareness, which Shepherd calls a step in the right direction. “Societies aren’t going to care about something they don’t understand,” he says. “People don’t know. That’s our biggest enemy: this global ignorance of how urgent the situation is.”

Wildlife trade and looming extinctions have probably never been in the spotlight as much as they are now, with global leaders calling for action and committing funds. “What we need now is for that high level attention and those funds to trickle down to the front lines where they’re needed, in places like Mong La and Jakarta, where there are big wildlife markets, in places along the Malaysia-Thai border, the hotspots, the trade hubs,” he says.

“I’ll be surprised if we have 3,000 tigers left. So clearly, enforcement efforts across the board in all tiger range states and consumer states are still not enough. We’re still losing tigers,” says Shepherd, adding, “There is absolutely no excuse for not saving wild tigers. It just takes commitment and effort.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter:  @sguynup

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Next up:  In part 10 of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at tigers in India.

Talking Tigers: Part 10 of a 12-part series

Amidst frequent heartbreaking stories about disappearing tigers, today there is some great news. India’s latest census has counted 2,226 tigers, a whopping  30 percent jump from the 1,706 documented in 2011. Nearly 10,000 “camera traps” were set up in known tiger territories; the resulting photographs definitively identified individuals because their stripes are unique, like a human fingerprint. 

At least 20 of those “new” tigers were found in areas not included in prior counts. Most of those gains came from within a few of the best-protected reserves, illustrating what we know about tigers. They are a prolific, adaptable species. They thrive with just the basics: food, water and a large enough place to live. When you add boots-on-the-ground protection, strong laws, enforcement and careful monitoring, they bounce back. On the flip side, not a single tiger was photographed in West Bengal’s 290-square-mile Buxa Tiger Reserve.

One reserve that has made a phenomenal comeback is Panna, in central India, which received an award today for excellent management. Given the park’s history, it’s quite remarkable. In 2009, Panna’s last tiger disappeared, poached out from under the noses of those supposedly protecting them. The tigers that were later translocated from other reserves have since bred successfully; today about 23 tigers live there.

While headlines proclaimed the news, an Oxford University-led study questioned the method used to extrapolate these numbers, which yielded what authors called “irreproducible and inaccurate results.” Study authors and the Indian government stand by their report. However, every scientific study—including this one—needs outside peer review.

There are more tigers in India, but disturbing news hangs over reports of rebounding numbers: It comes at a time when conservation is under serious attack and poaching remains a pervasive threat.

The country was at a similar juncture a few decades back. In 1971, only 1,800 tigers remained. Two years later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched “Project Tiger” which remains the world’s most comprehensive tiger conservation initiative. At the time of her assassination in 1984, tiger numbers topped 4,000. “Tigers flourished beyond our wildest dreams,” said Wright.

But then, during the 1990s, tigers vanished from across the Indian subcontinent in alarming numbers. The seizure of 2,200 pounds of tiger bone (from about 80 tigers) in Delhi in August 1993 made it obvious what was happening: Poaching for the Chinese medicinal trade (that used tigers parts as prime ingredients) had hit the subcontinent.

But it was worse than that. This hunting bonanza coincided with a period of unbridled development after Indira’s son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was voted out of office in 1991. “The plunder of India’s forests was in full swing,” remembers Valmik Thapar, one of the country’s premier tiger experts. “Laws, or no laws…it was all about greed.” Forests were razed, degraded and submerged beneath dam floodwaters, pillaged by mining projects and converted for industry and agriculture. Over the past two decades, the country lost a quarter of its wild lands.

Then, in 2008, the Wildlife Institute of India’s grim report shocked the nation and the world with its findings: Only 1,411 tigers were left despite a $400 million investment over 34 years to save them under Project Tiger. When compared with figures from 2002, most states in tiger range had lost half of their cats and overall, there was a stunning 60 percent drop from just six years before. Some of that difference was due to better census methods—but there were still far fewer tigers walking the Indian landscape.

History could repeat itself in what has become the tiger’s last real stronghold—and possibly their last best hope for long-term survival: India is home to 70 percent of the entire wild population. There are some disturbing parallels between the 1990s and today. A lucrative market for tiger skins and bones in China is now driving a new spike in poaching. And although substantially fewer tigers are dying now compared with the carnage that wiped out so many of them two decades ago, if proposed government initiatives move forward, ransacking of the country’s remaining wilderness could break previous records.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government, development has become the top priority. The election of Modi’s right wing National Democratic Alliance coalition last May sparked unparalleled action to dismantle the entire legal framework that protects land, forests, water and wildlife. There are also moves to do away with oversight that could hamper their efforts. “As of now, the dominant influence in the Prime Minister’s office seems to be that of large project promoters working in the sectors of mining, dams and roads,” says wildlife expert Bittu Sahgal. “They are currently and very directly influencing the government decisions to loosen existing laws, policies and guidelines, to facilitate industrial-scale project clearances at an unprecedented pace.”

It’s the culmination of a debate that has been framed as environment versus progress—just as it is in the U.S. and elsewhere. Powerful industry lobbies and politicians have stoked the myth that “green hurdles”—environmental laws—are strangling the country’s growth, says wildlife conservationist Prerna Bindra. But the rhetoric  just isn’t true. In recent years, more than 95 percent of development projects have been green lit. This is simply a land war, fueled by corporate profit—and the needs of 1.3 billion people. India’s last remaining protected lands that provide homes for endangered wildlife cover about 4.5 percent of the country; just 1.2 percent are tiger landscapes. In contrast, 27 percent of US lands are protected.

Many of the proposed changes will hit tigers hard—and globally, wild tigers are already in peril. Perhaps 3,000 remain, scattered across 11 countries, often in small, disconnected populations. A century ago, there were about 97,000 more tigers roaming 30 Asian nations. Wild tigers are almost gone—and in all but a handful of circumstances, those raised in captivity can’t be released into nature.

So the hope is that this celebration of India’s a growing tiger population is not short-lived. “The fact that India has conserved tigers rests on the foundation of a strong legal and policy framework,” says Bindra. “If we meddle with that framework, diluting laws, then it will create serious trouble for wildlife.”

Although the previous administration did not prioritize conservation, there was careful scrutiny of projects that could harm wildlife. Now the fight to oppose big projects like dams and mines is getting harder and harder, says Harshawardhan Dhanwatey, co-founder with his wife Poonam of the Tiger Research and Conservation Trust. “These are some of the only places tigers are found. So we’ll fight to the end.”

One proposed infrastructure project, a canal scheme that would carry water 137 miles through central India from the Ken River to the Betwa Basin, would inundate about one-third of Panna Tiger Reserve. It’s particularly disturbing after a huge investment of time and money to bring them back from local extinction. Back in 2011, then-environment minister Jairam Ramesh called Ken-Betwa a “disastrous” idea.  In theory, India’s tiger reserves are supposed to be “inviolate.”

This proposed large-scale, country-wide development threatens the corridors that are wildlife lifelines. Experts note the critical need to maintain the forested connections between tiger reserves that allow young, dispersing tigers to find their own territory—and spread their genes to avoid inbreeding. “Hopefully the new tiger figures and the prestige it brings to India will encourage the powers that be to show a lot more caution about approving development projects in tiger landscapes,” said Belinda Wright, director of the Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

But for now, let’s take a moment to celebrate the tiger, one of the most magnificent of our planet’s creatures, and to acknowledge the bravery, commitment and hard work of so many men and women that protect them, especially the park guards and forest officers working on the ground. Many of them work one-, two-, three-month shifts in the forest, living amidst dangerous animals, away from their families, often outfitted with with inadequate clothing or gear, fighting heavily-armed, dangerous poachers—for relatively little money. Given the many threats that face tigers, their efforts and this current triumph is truly remarkable.

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter:  @sguynup

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Next up: In part 11 of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at changes to India’s environmental regulations that are threatening the environment—and tigers. 

Talking Tigers: Part 8 of a 12-part series

The first signs that something was wrong came in 2000. Gaunt Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) began wandering through villages and staggered haltingly across roads in Russia’s Far East. They were dazed, hungry and boldly unafraid of humans, extremely odd behavior for this secretive, wary animal.

One of them was a skinny tigress named Galia, an animal that researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society had outfitted with a satellite collar. After several failed attempts to capture her, she was shot by police. Her three cubs were discovered nearby, dead. She’d been too sick to hunt, and had stumbled into a town to grab a cow, a pig, a dog, any easy prey to feed her starving family. Galia was the fourth collared study animal that the biologists lost that year. All of them died under puzzling circumstances.

Autopsies revealed the presence of some type of morbillivirus, a family of highly contagious viruses that infect people, dogs, and wildlife. (The word derives from morbus, meaning plague.) But it wasn’t until last year that US and Russian scientists conclusively identified the culprit: canine distemper virus (CDV), a close relative of human measles.

Now, with new outbreaks biologists and wildlife managers are trying to assess the scope of the threat. The Siberian (or Amur) tiger, the largest of the big cats, is one of the six remaining tiger subspecies and one of the most endangered. Somewhere between 250 and 400 are thought to still roam the lushly forested Sikhote-Alin mountains in southeast Siberia, its last real stronghold. (Current population numbers are expected in 2015 as part of a new global tiger census.)

These cats are in the emergency room, so investigating the origins and prevalence of the virus is crucial for future conservation efforts. CDV is a promiscuous pathogen that readily jumps between animal species and typically kills about half its victims. Like many viruses, it causes diarrhea, fever, dehydration, and can progress into pneumonia.

But it sometimes sparks more deadly symptoms in tigers that explain infected cats’ uncharacteristic actions: it can cause brain swelling and neurological problems. Researchers reported that at least 1 percent of the Amur tiger population succumbed to  the disease from 2009 to 2013. But even those that survive are at risk: impaired tigers that have lost their fear of humans can easily be shot by poachers or killed by locals who are concerned over safety.

The virus is suspected to have caused the deaths of thousands of Caspian seals during outbreaks in 1988 and 2000; it nearly exterminated the black-footed ferret and has decimated Africa’s wild dog populations.

Researchers had long believed that cats were resistant. Although domestic cats could be infected in the laboratory, they didn’t get sick or transmit the virus to others. But then, in 1994, CDV  hit Serengeti lions. The epidemic took down about a third of the population, killing about nearly 1,000 animals in one deadly swoop—as well as a huge number of leopards, bat-eared foxes, and hyenas.

Amur tigers have already been brought back from the brink once. They once roamed across the entire Russian Far East, the Korean peninsula, and northern China. But by the 1940s, both they and their prey had been nearly hunted out: maybe 40 survived.

Russia became the world’s first country to fully protect tigers, and by the 1980s, the population had rebounded to about 500. That recovery, however, was short-lived. A deadly confluence of events brought a new flood of illegal hunters to the region: the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian economy later crashed, and China’s insatiable demand for tiger parts grew and tigers became a high-priced commodity. These well-armed hunters are a new breed, often linked to international crime syndicates that smuggle endangered wildlife.  Tigers are the top prize, but poachers also target the tiger’s prey: deer, boar, and elk, leaving them little to eat.

With sparse prey living in this northern temperate landscape, Siberian tigers need immense territories to survive; large scale illegal logging is whittling away its forest home and impacting its prey, which feed on these trees when the land is blanketed in snow. (A female needs at least 175 square miles to feed her and her cubs, drastically larger than India’s Bengal tigers that need just eight square miles because food is abundant.)

At least one-third of all Russian timber exports are illegal; the US is the top importer of these hardwoods; and logging in the Amur tiger’s range has more than doubled since 2000, according to a World Wildlife Fund report. And then there’s the land that’s been cleared to make way for agriculture, expanding towns, roads, mines and other development.

It’s created small, isolated tiger populations that are less likely to survive CDV, according to a study published last month in the journal PLOS. Using computer modeling, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, University of Glasgow, and other institutions found that tigers that living in areas that held were roughly 55 percent more likely to die out within the next 50 years.

This cat still carries the legacy of their near-extinction. A genetic analysis of 95 Siberian tigers published in Molecular Biology found that the gene pool had constricted dramatically. So much so that one of the authors, Michael Russello of the University of British Columbia, said that the population is behaving as if it were the size of 27 to 35 individuals. Because they are such tiny populations, losing even a few animals, can further bottleneck their already low genetic diversity, making them more susceptible to disease.

“This might just be enough to push them over the edge,” said University of Nottingham veterinary virologist Rachael Tarlinton.

Biologists can’t stave off an epidemic if they don’t know the source. Siberian tigers catch CDV when they eat infected animals, but which ones? Domestic dogs are of greatest concern, but  raccoon dogs, foxes, and other local animals also harbor the disease.

If dogs are indeed the main carrier, it will require a blitzkreig vaccination effort. Inoculating tigers with an injected vaccine is impossible.

Protecting remaining forest is another antidote, according to the authors of the PLOS study. “In lieu of a practical means of delivering [canine distemper virus] vaccines to wild tigers, the most viable strategy to ensure their conservation is the maintenance of large connected populations within protected areas that buffer the effects of local declines,” they wrote.

The situation is quite serious, said McAloose. “It’s the first infectious disease that we know is a significant risk to Amur tiger survival.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

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Next up:  In part nine of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at a new study on the tiger trade in Myanmar’s border towns.

Talking Tigers: Part 9 of a 12-part series

A decades-long investigation found that the illicit trade in tigers and other wild cats has been nearly shut down in Tachilek—a frontier town in eastern Myanmar—most likely because of heightened security across the border in Thailand. But the situation in Mong La, a lawless Burmese city on the Chinese border, is radically different. Over the past eight years, the number of shops selling cat parts and products has more than tripled. 

This new report from TRAFFIC,  an organization that monitors the global wildlife trade, confirms that Mong La is a major hub funneling wildlife products into China. Their findings illustrate the success of a boots-on-the-ground fight against trafficking—and show how lack of enforcement allows crime to flourish. The data was published in the journal Biological Conservation.

This study began when Chris Shepherd, who now heads TRAFFIC’s Southeast Asia office, first visited Tachilek in the 1990s. The streets were lined with shops selling a staggering array of wildlife products. Tiger pelts hung on the walls. Tiger and leopard skulls, claws, and teeth, along with the skins of many small and large felines lined glass cases and were displayed on tables beside the bones, horns and antlers of an astonishing number of species.  Many of the animals being sold there, including all wild cats, are protected under an international treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Tachilek has been a well-known center for buyers and smugglers for decades. Myanmar is a major opium producer—number two, behind Afghanistan—and Thai border towns have been key transit points since World War II. Tachilek,  “the Capital of the Golden Triangle,” is home to drug lords who use the same routes to trade in heroin, guns, women—and illegal wildlife.

Shepherd and others returned periodically over the next 22 years, conducting 19 surveys from 1991 to 2013. They carefully tallied and photographed the cat products offered for sale. Over tea, they chatted with dealers who boasted about customers who poured in from Thailand, Taiwan, and all over Asia to buy their goods. They had nothing to fear. Enforcement was weak on the Thai side of the border, and virtually nonexistent in Tachilek.

By the turn of the millennium, tiger numbers had dwindled to somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. With greater media scrutiny, sellers grew cagey. They no longer spoke openly or allowed pictures. Some hid their wares, only pulling them out for prospective buyers. Slowly, the wildlife market all but died. The 35 shops that sold cat merchandise in 2000 shrank to just six last year. “I think this speaks volumes for the power of raising awareness,” says Shepherd. “Putting issues like this in the spotlight is essential.”

A similar survey launched in Mong La in 2001. It’s a city that was carved from dense jungle in Myanmar’s remote northeastern Shan state to become the capital of Special Region No. 4. This semi-autonomous area is run by the rebel National Democratic Alliance Army, the military arm of the Kokang, a Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese ethnic group.

Mong La is a seedy, Burmese version of Las Vegas with little rule of law. It runs on gambling, prostitution, money laundering—and a thriving commerce in rare wildlife that caters to clients from China.

In 2006, six shops carried wild cat parts and derivatives. But since then, value and demand have spiked, driven by China’s legal trade in tiger skins and a clamor for tiger bone wine; though the sale of tiger bone is illegal in China, officials turn a blind eye. Earlier this year, 21 shops were trading in cats.

The study’s authors, Shepherd and Oxford anthropology professor Vincent Nijman, say that the increase in cat trade in Mong La correlates with the burgeoning buying power of China’s consumers—and the seeming ease of smuggling across this rather porous border. Traffickers have little fear of being stopped.

The city’s huge outdoor “wet market” sells animals brought in overnight, everything from cats and slow loris to bear cubs, birds and deer, anything that local hunters can get their hands on. It’s a morning market where proprietors slaughter animals on the spot for customers who come for meat or fresh skins.

Then there are high-end shops scattered across the city that handle luxury goods: ivory and hippo teeth from Africa, helmeted hornbills from Indonesia, Tibetan antelope heads, rhino horn—and extremely expensive tiger pelts. “Clearly this [boutique trade] is targeted at some serious players,” says Shepherd.

The bones are the priciest part of the tiger. They were rarely seen during surveys in Mong La, probably because they are in such high demand.

For those who wish to dine on wildlife after a visit to a  casino or a brothel, there are numerous establishments filled with an almost unimaginable variety of caged animals. Many of these restaurants boast huge glass tanks of wine with whole tiger skeletons floating inside. Others advertise tiger bone wine by hanging tiger skins on the walls. If you wanted to order tiger meat, you could probably get it, Shepherd says grimly.

Serious quantities of wildlife are consumed in town, but a lot is also being smuggled out. Mong La is one of Asia’s largest open wildlife markets, says Shepherd, and “it’s clearly a major facilitator for cross-border tiger trade.” You can buy just about anything, at any time. But he notes that some dealers are quite guarded about selling tiger parts. “There’s no one there who doesn’t know that it’s illegal.”

Where the tigers are coming from is anyone’s guess. Dealers have consistently claimed that most of their cat merchandise was hunted locally, though some tigers were being smuggled from India. Previous studies in Tachilek traced big cat skins and bones to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Smaller cats like clouded leopards and Asiatic golden cats still hang on in Myanmar, but very few tigers remain. They’ve been heavily hunted, originally as vermin, later as trophies. Whole swathes of their forest habitat have been leveled.  The volume of wild pigs, muntjac deer, and other game species being traded in Mong La is alarming; without food, there are no tigers. What’s even more disturbing is that many deer species in Southest Asia have become so hard to find that they’ve completely disappeared from the markets. Stopping the tiger trade without stopping the trade in their prey is short-sighted, says Shepherd. “It’s a whole package.”

Borders are often defined by rivers, mountains or natural bottlenecks, places where enforcement can have a real impact. But wildlife trafficking is low on the list of priorities for border officials. The Thai side of the Tachilek border is well-manned, and officials fill big containers with confiscated wildlife. It clearly shows that enforcement can be a deterrent.

Because Mong La is in a “non-government” region, a crackdown on the Myanmar side of the border is unlikely, so Chinese authorities need to be encouraged to act. “If people can’t take wildlife across the border, it’ll strangle this market,” says Shepherd. “You can argue that they’ll just move somewhere else; so then you go shut it down there. Any crime is like that. You have to keep chasing it, crushing it wherever it pops up.”

The key to saving tigers and all wildlife, he says, is threefold. First off, reducing demand and proper enforcement of wildlife laws is crucial. Secondly, we need to make the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species work: CITES regulates that trade under a treaty signed by 180 nations. “If countries were held accountable for their commitments to the convention, and implemented and enforced CITES, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now,” says Shepherd.

Currently, that’s not happening. Most countries in Southeast Asia—including major wildlife trading countries such as Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia—don’t have adequate wildlife protection laws on the books, despite the fact that all parties are obliged to have a legal structure in place that makes CITES enforceable.

Lastly, Shepherd says that  in order to save wildlife, society as a whole must care. It requires a populace that frowns on those who use threatened species as meat or trophies, that understands conservation issues, that doesn’t want to witness a mass extinction.

Without public support, there won’t be adequate pressure to pass necessary legislation or to increase enforcement efforts. In China and elsewhere, celebrities and athletes are raising awareness, which Shepherd calls a step in the right direction. “Societies aren’t going to care about something they don’t understand,” he says. “People don’t know. That’s our biggest enemy: this global ignorance of how urgent the situation is.”

Wildlife trade and looming extinctions have probably never been in the spotlight as much as they are now, with global leaders calling for action and committing funds. “What we need now is for that high level attention and those funds to trickle down to the front lines where they’re needed, in places like Mong La and Jakarta, where there are big wildlife markets, in places along the Malaysia-Thai border, the hotspots, the trade hubs,” he says.

“I’ll be surprised if we have 3,000 tigers left. So clearly, enforcement efforts across the board in all tiger range states and consumer states are still not enough. We’re still losing tigers,” says Shepherd, adding, “There is absolutely no excuse for not saving wild tigers. It just takes commitment and effort.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter:  @sguynup

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Next up:  In part 10 of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at tigers in India.

Talking Tigers: Part 10 of a 12-part series

Amidst frequent heartbreaking stories about disappearing tigers, today there is some great news. India’s latest census has counted 2,226 tigers, a whopping  30 percent jump from the 1,706 documented in 2011. Nearly 10,000 “camera traps” were set up in known tiger territories; the resulting photographs definitively identified individuals because their stripes are unique, like a human fingerprint. 

At least 20 of those “new” tigers were found in areas not included in prior counts. Most of those gains came from within a few of the best-protected reserves, illustrating what we know about tigers. They are a prolific, adaptable species. They thrive with just the basics: food, water and a large enough place to live. When you add boots-on-the-ground protection, strong laws, enforcement and careful monitoring, they bounce back. On the flip side, not a single tiger was photographed in West Bengal’s 290-square-mile Buxa Tiger Reserve.

One reserve that has made a phenomenal comeback is Panna, in central India, which received an award today for excellent management. Given the park’s history, it’s quite remarkable. In 2009, Panna’s last tiger disappeared, poached out from under the noses of those supposedly protecting them. The tigers that were later translocated from other reserves have since bred successfully; today about 23 tigers live there.

While headlines proclaimed the news, an Oxford University-led study questioned the method used to extrapolate these numbers, which yielded what authors called “irreproducible and inaccurate results.” Study authors and the Indian government stand by their report. However, every scientific study—including this one—needs outside peer review.

There are more tigers in India, but disturbing news hangs over reports of rebounding numbers: It comes at a time when conservation is under serious attack and poaching remains a pervasive threat.

The country was at a similar juncture a few decades back. In 1971, only 1,800 tigers remained. Two years later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched “Project Tiger” which remains the world’s most comprehensive tiger conservation initiative. At the time of her assassination in 1984, tiger numbers topped 4,000. “Tigers flourished beyond our wildest dreams,” said Wright.

But then, during the 1990s, tigers vanished from across the Indian subcontinent in alarming numbers. The seizure of 2,200 pounds of tiger bone (from about 80 tigers) in Delhi in August 1993 made it obvious what was happening: Poaching for the Chinese medicinal trade (that used tigers parts as prime ingredients) had hit the subcontinent.

But it was worse than that. This hunting bonanza coincided with a period of unbridled development after Indira’s son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was voted out of office in 1991. “The plunder of India’s forests was in full swing,” remembers Valmik Thapar, one of the country’s premier tiger experts. “Laws, or no laws…it was all about greed.” Forests were razed, degraded and submerged beneath dam floodwaters, pillaged by mining projects and converted for industry and agriculture. Over the past two decades, the country lost a quarter of its wild lands.

Then, in 2008, the Wildlife Institute of India’s grim report shocked the nation and the world with its findings: Only 1,411 tigers were left despite a $400 million investment over 34 years to save them under Project Tiger. When compared with figures from 2002, most states in tiger range had lost half of their cats and overall, there was a stunning 60 percent drop from just six years before. Some of that difference was due to better census methods—but there were still far fewer tigers walking the Indian landscape.

History could repeat itself in what has become the tiger’s last real stronghold—and possibly their last best hope for long-term survival: India is home to 70 percent of the entire wild population. There are some disturbing parallels between the 1990s and today. A lucrative market for tiger skins and bones in China is now driving a new spike in poaching. And although substantially fewer tigers are dying now compared with the carnage that wiped out so many of them two decades ago, if proposed government initiatives move forward, ransacking of the country’s remaining wilderness could break previous records.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government, development has become the top priority. The election of Modi’s right wing National Democratic Alliance coalition last May sparked unparalleled action to dismantle the entire legal framework that protects land, forests, water and wildlife. There are also moves to do away with oversight that could hamper their efforts. “As of now, the dominant influence in the Prime Minister’s office seems to be that of large project promoters working in the sectors of mining, dams and roads,” says wildlife expert Bittu Sahgal. “They are currently and very directly influencing the government decisions to loosen existing laws, policies and guidelines, to facilitate industrial-scale project clearances at an unprecedented pace.”

It’s the culmination of a debate that has been framed as environment versus progress—just as it is in the U.S. and elsewhere. Powerful industry lobbies and politicians have stoked the myth that “green hurdles”—environmental laws—are strangling the country’s growth, says wildlife conservationist Prerna Bindra. But the rhetoric  just isn’t true. In recent years, more than 95 percent of development projects have been green lit. This is simply a land war, fueled by corporate profit—and the needs of 1.3 billion people. India’s last remaining protected lands that provide homes for endangered wildlife cover about 4.5 percent of the country; just 1.2 percent are tiger landscapes. In contrast, 27 percent of US lands are protected.

Many of the proposed changes will hit tigers hard—and globally, wild tigers are already in peril. Perhaps 3,000 remain, scattered across 11 countries, often in small, disconnected populations. A century ago, there were about 97,000 more tigers roaming 30 Asian nations. Wild tigers are almost gone—and in all but a handful of circumstances, those raised in captivity can’t be released into nature.

So the hope is that this celebration of India’s a growing tiger population is not short-lived. “The fact that India has conserved tigers rests on the foundation of a strong legal and policy framework,” says Bindra. “If we meddle with that framework, diluting laws, then it will create serious trouble for wildlife.”

Although the previous administration did not prioritize conservation, there was careful scrutiny of projects that could harm wildlife. Now the fight to oppose big projects like dams and mines is getting harder and harder, says Harshawardhan Dhanwatey, co-founder with his wife Poonam of the Tiger Research and Conservation Trust. “These are some of the only places tigers are found. So we’ll fight to the end.”

One proposed infrastructure project, a canal scheme that would carry water 137 miles through central India from the Ken River to the Betwa Basin, would inundate about one-third of Panna Tiger Reserve. It’s particularly disturbing after a huge investment of time and money to bring them back from local extinction. Back in 2011, then-environment minister Jairam Ramesh called Ken-Betwa a “disastrous” idea.  In theory, India’s tiger reserves are supposed to be “inviolate.”

This proposed large-scale, country-wide development threatens the corridors that are wildlife lifelines. Experts note the critical need to maintain the forested connections between tiger reserves that allow young, dispersing tigers to find their own territory—and spread their genes to avoid inbreeding. “Hopefully the new tiger figures and the prestige it brings to India will encourage the powers that be to show a lot more caution about approving development projects in tiger landscapes,” said Belinda Wright, director of the Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

But for now, let’s take a moment to celebrate the tiger, one of the most magnificent of our planet’s creatures, and to acknowledge the bravery, commitment and hard work of so many men and women that protect them, especially the park guards and forest officers working on the ground. Many of them work one-, two-, three-month shifts in the forest, living amidst dangerous animals, away from their families, often outfitted with with inadequate clothing or gear, fighting heavily-armed, dangerous poachers—for relatively little money. Given the many threats that face tigers, their efforts and this current triumph is truly remarkable.

~~~~~

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter:  @sguynup

~~~~~

Next up: In part 11 of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look at changes to India’s environmental regulations that are threatening the environment—and tigers. 

Talking Tigers: Part 3 of a 12-part series

We pulled out of the honking pandemonium of morning traffic into the cement schoolyard of Chhotubhai Patel High School. It was only slightly quieter than the street. Hundreds of kids milled about or huddled in small groups, practicing cheers that blended into a rhythmic, unintelligible wall of sound.

Those who weren’t dressed in school uniforms sported tiger T-shirts that proclaimed “LEAVE ME ALONE” in bold type. Photographer Steve Winter and I jumped out of the car: We’d come to film this rally. Kids with painted tiger faces roared at us as we weaved through the crowd.

Shortly, 1,200 students streamed into the streets of the small central Indian city of Chandrapur, halting traffic. They screamed with deafening exuberance, so loud it echoed off the buildings. Save the tiger! Save the forest! Everyone—pedestrians, motorists, store owners—stopped to watch.

Many of the marchers carried signs and banners in English and Hindi that identified their affiliation, Kids for Tigers. These high schoolers are part of a groundswell youth movement that is now more than a million strong across the country. I had chills watching them. Despite the constant, heartbreaking news I hear almost daily about the tiger’s continuing demise, these kids inspired hope.

The program is the brainchild of Bittu Sahgal, a man who fell in love with tigers on a safari to Kanha National Park in 1973. It was the same year Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger to rescue the cat from extinction. Repeated expeditions into India’s national parks turned him into a part-time activist. He used skills he’d gained working in advertising, writing newspaper articles, and campaigning, sometimes successfully, against assaults on the land in key tiger habitats—particularly around India’s nine newly-established tiger reserves. Mines, dams, roads, chemical complexes, and other development were creeping, like mange, into tiger habitat, he said.

A campfire conversation transformed him into one of India’s most influential tiger defenders. In 1980, Sahgal asked Fateh Singh Rathore, the head of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, how he could help tigers. “Start a wildlife magazine,” Rathore said, “so that city people learn to appreciate wildlife and do less damage!” Sanctuary Asia was born 10 months later, India’s first environmental news magazine, which Sahgal still edits.

Then came Sanctuary Cub, a bi-monthly kid’s magazine, a 16-episode “Project Tiger” TV series, (which was viewed by some 30 million people), and a children’s TV series on conservation. Eventually, Sahgal was posted to high-profile government committees, where he and others who fought to protect natural resources were ignored or summarily dispatched by those pushing for big development projects. “Our advice was found unpalatable,” he said.

To fight his growing cynicism, he turned to India’s youth: In 2000, he launched Kids for Tigers. “They have the greatest legitimacy to ask for a better tomorrow,” he said. “Essentially, we wanted to give the children a voice. We wanted to explain…that you can make a difference.”

The program has created a new generation of tiger advocates through nature walks, educational films, camps, and a conservation agenda that’s been adopted by more than 500 schools in 20 cities. Kids for Tigers started in urban centers—New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore—and then branched out into smaller towns and cities like Chandrapur that border tiger reserves. “We now have a veritable army of young kids,” said Sahgal.

It’s an easy sell. This huge orange-and-black cat is deeply woven into India’s history, religion, and folklore. The Hindu goddess Durga vanquished a monster-demon while astride her ferocious mount, a tiger. Some Indians refer to the tiger as a striped water-god who creates rain and can end drought. The cat is thought to keep nightmares away and to lead lost children to safety. Pulikali dancers in Kerala, along India’s southern coast, paint themselves as tigers for an elaborate harvest festival that celebrates the cat’s power and strength. And the tiger is, after all, India’s national animal.

~~~~~~~~~~~

We went to St. Gregorios School in Mumbai to film a Kids for Tigers school assembly. There I met 12-year-old Kush Somaiya, who was in full tiger face paint. He told me that a few years ago, before the program took him and his classmates into nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park, he’d spent little time outside of urban areas. I asked him how he liked getting out into the forest.

“First, I was not that much into nature,” he said. “But after coming with them I came to know that nature is such a beautiful thing, and what we see in nature is damned unusual and we can’t see it out in normal life or out in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai.”

He paused, then smiled. “The jungle is a gem and the thing that enhances the gem is the tiger. The tiger is the best. I love him!”

This was Sahgal’s goal: To give city kids the opportunity to fall in love with tigers and with nature, and  to teach them that we can’t save tigers without saving their home. By preserving the remaining big tracts of forest, wetlands, and jungle that tigers need to survive, he says, we’re giving them space to hunt, find  a mate, and enough land to survive catastrophic events, like floods or drought.

But he has a much larger message, one that I watched him deliver before hundreds of middle and high school kids at St. Gregorios. “If you save the tiger, you save the planet—and you save yourselves. And you guys are the voice for tomorrow, so remind the adults that…you don’t want them to destroy your world.”

He gives them a wide ecological view that few of us ever hear. Saving a forest—conservation on a grand scale—has effects that radiate outward with global implications. Those wild lands pull carbon from the atmosphere and slow climate change. They prevent erosion of the rich soil that we need to grow crops. Forests feed water into 600-plus Indian rivers and streams that run through them, watersheds that provide drinking water for millions of people.

By protecting tigers—and the top predators in any food chain—we also save the entire spectrum of life that shares their realm, preserving ecosystems that have been fine-tuned over millennia.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kids across India now march in the streets for tiger protection. A rally in New Delhi drew 25,000 children. They influence their parents, and they petition government officials. One year, they collected over two million signatures and delivered a truckload of them to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “Did we do this so that we would influence the Prime Minister?” Sahgal said. “Perhaps, but the real truth is that everyone who signed that letter stepped over a line. They weren’t sitting on the fence anymore. Those kids came over to our side and said, ‘Yes, we will save the tiger!’” He says they’ll continue to send letters to heads of state and other officials. “I think adults are more difficult to convince than the kids, but we have very determined kids on our side.”

A week after meeting with a delegation of these kids in 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee stood before India’s National Board of Wildlife. “Our children have woken up; why are we adults all asleep?” he asked.

Sahgal notes that 1,200 teachers are part of what he calls ‘Teachers for Tigers’. “So we have teachers on our side, we have kids on our side, we have parents on our side, we have the media on our side,” he said. “All we need now is to get a few politicians on our side so that they don’t destroy these forests before the kids take over the steering wheel.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part four of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look into the history of tiger hunting in India.

Talking Tigers: Part 3 of a 12-part series

We pulled out of the honking pandemonium of morning traffic into the cement schoolyard of Chhotubhai Patel High School. It was only slightly quieter than the street. Hundreds of kids milled about or huddled in small groups, practicing cheers that blended into a rhythmic, unintelligible wall of sound.

Those who weren’t dressed in school uniforms sported tiger T-shirts that proclaimed “LEAVE ME ALONE” in bold type. Photographer Steve Winter and I jumped out of the car: We’d come to film this rally. Kids with painted tiger faces roared at us as we weaved through the crowd.

Shortly, 1,200 students streamed into the streets of the small central Indian city of Chandrapur, halting traffic. They screamed with deafening exuberance, so loud it echoed off the buildings. Save the tiger! Save the forest! Everyone—pedestrians, motorists, store owners—stopped to watch.

Many of the marchers carried signs and banners in English and Hindi that identified their affiliation, Kids for Tigers. These high schoolers are part of a groundswell youth movement that is now more than a million strong across the country. I had chills watching them. Despite the constant, heartbreaking news I hear almost daily about the tiger’s continuing demise, these kids inspired hope.

The program is the brainchild of Bittu Sahgal, a man who fell in love with tigers on a safari to Kanha National Park in 1973. It was the same year Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger to rescue the cat from extinction. Repeated expeditions into India’s national parks turned him into a part-time activist. He used skills he’d gained working in advertising, writing newspaper articles, and campaigning, sometimes successfully, against assaults on the land in key tiger habitats—particularly around India’s nine newly-established tiger reserves. Mines, dams, roads, chemical complexes, and other development were creeping, like mange, into tiger habitat, he said.

A campfire conversation transformed him into one of India’s most influential tiger defenders. In 1980, Sahgal asked Fateh Singh Rathore, the head of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, how he could help tigers. “Start a wildlife magazine,” Rathore said, “so that city people learn to appreciate wildlife and do less damage!” Sanctuary Asia was born 10 months later, India’s first environmental news magazine, which Sahgal still edits.

Then came Sanctuary Cub, a bi-monthly kid’s magazine, a 16-episode “Project Tiger” TV series, (which was viewed by some 30 million people), and a children’s TV series on conservation. Eventually, Sahgal was posted to high-profile government committees, where he and others who fought to protect natural resources were ignored or summarily dispatched by those pushing for big development projects. “Our advice was found unpalatable,” he said.

To fight his growing cynicism, he turned to India’s youth: In 2000, he launched Kids for Tigers. “They have the greatest legitimacy to ask for a better tomorrow,” he said. “Essentially, we wanted to give the children a voice. We wanted to explain…that you can make a difference.”

The program has created a new generation of tiger advocates through nature walks, educational films, camps, and a conservation agenda that’s been adopted by more than 500 schools in 20 cities. Kids for Tigers started in urban centers—New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore—and then branched out into smaller towns and cities like Chandrapur that border tiger reserves. “We now have a veritable army of young kids,” said Sahgal.

It’s an easy sell. This huge orange-and-black cat is deeply woven into India’s history, religion, and folklore. The Hindu goddess Durga vanquished a monster-demon while astride her ferocious mount, a tiger. Some Indians refer to the tiger as a striped water-god who creates rain and can end drought. The cat is thought to keep nightmares away and to lead lost children to safety. Pulikali dancers in Kerala, along India’s southern coast, paint themselves as tigers for an elaborate harvest festival that celebrates the cat’s power and strength. And the tiger is, after all, India’s national animal.

~~~~~~~~~~~

We went to St. Gregorios School in Mumbai to film a Kids for Tigers school assembly. There I met 12-year-old Kush Somaiya, who was in full tiger face paint. He told me that a few years ago, before the program took him and his classmates into nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park, he’d spent little time outside of urban areas. I asked him how he liked getting out into the forest.

“First, I was not that much into nature,” he said. “But after coming with them I came to know that nature is such a beautiful thing, and what we see in nature is damned unusual and we can’t see it out in normal life or out in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai.”

He paused, then smiled. “The jungle is a gem and the thing that enhances the gem is the tiger. The tiger is the best. I love him!”

This was Sahgal’s goal: To give city kids the opportunity to fall in love with tigers and with nature, and  to teach them that we can’t save tigers without saving their home. By preserving the remaining big tracts of forest, wetlands, and jungle that tigers need to survive, he says, we’re giving them space to hunt, find  a mate, and enough land to survive catastrophic events, like floods or drought.

But he has a much larger message, one that I watched him deliver before hundreds of middle and high school kids at St. Gregorios. “If you save the tiger, you save the planet—and you save yourselves. And you guys are the voice for tomorrow, so remind the adults that…you don’t want them to destroy your world.”

He gives them a wide ecological view that few of us ever hear. Saving a forest—conservation on a grand scale—has effects that radiate outward with global implications. Those wild lands pull carbon from the atmosphere and slow climate change. They prevent erosion of the rich soil that we need to grow crops. Forests feed water into 600-plus Indian rivers and streams that run through them, watersheds that provide drinking water for millions of people.

By protecting tigers—and the top predators in any food chain—we also save the entire spectrum of life that shares their realm, preserving ecosystems that have been fine-tuned over millennia.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kids across India now march in the streets for tiger protection. A rally in New Delhi drew 25,000 children. They influence their parents, and they petition government officials. One year, they collected over two million signatures and delivered a truckload of them to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “Did we do this so that we would influence the Prime Minister?” Sahgal said. “Perhaps, but the real truth is that everyone who signed that letter stepped over a line. They weren’t sitting on the fence anymore. Those kids came over to our side and said, ‘Yes, we will save the tiger!’” He says they’ll continue to send letters to heads of state and other officials. “I think adults are more difficult to convince than the kids, but we have very determined kids on our side.”

A week after meeting with a delegation of these kids in 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee stood before India’s National Board of Wildlife. “Our children have woken up; why are we adults all asleep?” he asked.

Sahgal notes that 1,200 teachers are part of what he calls ‘Teachers for Tigers’. “So we have teachers on our side, we have kids on our side, we have parents on our side, we have the media on our side,” he said. “All we need now is to get a few politicians on our side so that they don’t destroy these forests before the kids take over the steering wheel.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part four of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll look into the history of tiger hunting in India.

Talking Tigers: Part 4 of a 12-part series

India’s tigers have been in the crosshairs for centuries, with elite safaris dating back to the early 16th century. They rose out of Mughal Emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar’s passion for big game: He began a tradition of  royal hunting, or shikar, that was carried on by Mughal rulers until the dynasty fell in 1857. Paintings from the period depict Mongol, Rajput, Turk  and Afghan nobility hunting from elephant or horseback. These outings were considered exotic, heroic sport—and tigers were the ultimate trophies.

Staging elaborate big game hunts was also a favorite pastime for the British Raj that succeeded the Mughals, an activity that showcased their royalty, machismo, power and wealth. They took out tigers with reckless abandon, along with their Indian counterparts that ruled (nominally) sovereign “Princely States.” Kings and lords, generals, and Maharajas went out in large parties, carried by 10, 20, 30 or even 40 elephants; their servants often drugged and baited tigers before they arrived so the hunters were in little danger. They legitimized the slaughter by vilifying the cats, casting them as terrible, bloodthirsty beasts with an unquenchable desire for human flesh.

After ascending the throne in 1911, King George V and his retinue traveled north to Nepal, slaying 39 tigers in 10 days. Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale shot more than 300 tigers in India. In the 1920s, Umed Singh II, the Maharaja of Kotah, modified a flaming red Rolls Royce Phantom for tiger safaris in the Rajastani hills, outfitting it with spotlights for night hunting, a mounted machine gun and a Lantaka cannon. Newly-crowned Rewa kings in Central India thought it auspicious to slay 109 tigers after their coronation. Shooting a tiger was a coming-of-age ritual for young Indian princes.

According to historian Mahesh Rangarajan, “over 80,000 tigers…were slaughtered in 50 years from 1875 to 1925. It is possible that this was only a fraction of the numbers actually slain.” Not all were trophy-hunted: In some regions, the cats were considered vermin, systematically exterminated with incentive from government bounties.

The killing escalated after 1947. Independence ushered in a hunting free-for-all similar to the 1880s shooting spree that decimated bison herds on the American plains. Anyone who laid hands on a gun joined in. Soon after, hunters streamed in from around the world, seduced by the guaranteed premiere trophies advertised by travel agencies—tiger, elephant, rhino, lion, and other iconic species. The Maharajas created staggering new hunting records. In a letter, the Maharaja of Surguja told wildlife biologist George Schaller that by 1965, he’d bagged 1,150 tigers. Because the biggest animals made the best trophies, the largest, strongest cats disappeared from the gene pool.

And then, as models and Hollywood starlets draped themselves in cat skin coats, a fashion craze for fur took hold in the U.S. and Europe. A tiger pelt fetched $50 in India during the 1950s; 10 years later, rugs and coats sold for $10,000. When conservationist Anne Wright explored markets in Delhi—where shelves groaned with skins—she found that the vast majority lacked proper permits and were being exported illegally.

Things changed, however, when Indira Gandhi took the reins as prime minister in 1966. She became what tiger expert Valmik Thapar calls “India’s greatest wildlife savior.” She spearheaded a fight against the growing tiger crisis, outlawing the export of skins in 1969 and appointing a Tiger Task Force two years later.

At the close of the 19th century, when Rudyard Kipling penned the Jungle Book, between 50,000 and 100,000 tigers were thought to roam the Indian subcontinent; by 1971, about 1,800 were left alive and the Tiger Task Force predicted they would be extinct by the end of the century. That year, the Delhi High Court banned tiger killing, despite opposition from the trophy hunting industry that was raking in $4 million a year.

Then in 1973, Gandhi launched “Project Tiger,” which still stands as the world’s most comprehensive tiger conservation initiative. She established nine tiger reserves, hired guards to patrol them, and forcibly moved whole villages outside their perimeters.

At the time of Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, tiger numbers topped 4,000, their prey had increased, and India had created a global model for wildlife conservation. “Tigers flourished beyond our wildest dreams,” said Belinda Wright, Anne’s daughter and director of the Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

But by the late 1980s, tigers began to vanish. Rapidly. Biologists and conservationists who reported disappearances to officials were ignored. The seizure of 2,200 pounds of tiger bone (from about 80 tigers) in Delhi in August 1993 revealed what was happening: Poaching for the traditional Chinese medicine trade had hit the Subcontinent, sparking what was being called “the second tiger crisis.” To meet a growing demand for tiger parts, the cats were being poisoned, shot, and snared across India.

Meanwhile, wildlife wardens and Project Tiger officials dismissed the warnings, clinging to inflated population numbers based on flawed data. Their 2002 census counted a whopping 3,642 tigers. They estimated populations from paw prints, an unreliable method known to re-count the same cats multiple times.

But the scandal went public in June 2004 when national headlines proclaimed the unthinkable: Not a single tiger survived in Sariska Tiger Reserve, despite government claims that 18 tigers lived there. When three men were later arrested, they described how easy it was to kill them: Many of the guard’s walkie-talkies were nonfunctional and none of the 300 guards were at their posts during monsoon season. The poachers had even brought in live bait and shot tigers over their kills.

Project Tiger had become, as Valmik wrote, “a success story gone horribly wrong.” A 2006 auditor’s report found the project riddled with corruption and neglect. Funds had been skimmed by state governments for other purposes. Guards that quit or retired were not replaced; 30 percent of posts were vacant and the average ranger was over 50 years old. Those that remained walked dangerous patrols armed with bamboo sticks or ancient Lee-Enfield rifles—50 year-old British Army-issue weapons, outgunned by poachers toting assault rifles or AK-47s. Ultimately, the embarrassment over extinction in Sariska prompted the creation of a new entity, the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The Wildlife Institute of India’s grim 2008 report shocked India and the world with its findings: A far more accurate camera trap survey counted just 1,411 adult tigers—after a $400 million investment over 34 years to save them under Project Tiger. Two years later, a wider census raised tiger estimates to 1,706.

Today there are 45 tiger reserves, comprising about one percent of India’s land. Some hold only a handful of tigers. “Just creating reserves is not a magic wand,” says Deborah Banks, an investigator with the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency. “We still need people, resources, and the political will to protect them.”

Poaching continues to skyrocket, and over the last thee years, tiger deaths (from all causes) have been high: 71 in 2011, an all-time record of 88 in 2012, and 80 in 2013.

A new census is currently underway. India and the world awaits the results: The country is home to over half of all remaining wild tigers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part five of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll explore Asian cultures’ “cult of the tiger”–how tigers have been an iconic symbol of power and courage, woven into culture, religion, folklore and ritual throughout human history.

Talking Tigers: Part 4 of a 12-part series

India’s tigers have been in the crosshairs for centuries, with elite safaris dating back to the early 16th century. They rose out of Mughal Emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar’s passion for big game: He began a tradition of  royal hunting, or shikar, that was carried on by Mughal rulers until the dynasty fell in 1857. Paintings from the period depict Mongol, Rajput, Turk  and Afghan nobility hunting from elephant or horseback. These outings were considered exotic, heroic sport—and tigers were the ultimate trophies.

Staging elaborate big game hunts was also a favorite pastime for the British Raj that succeeded the Mughals, an activity that showcased their royalty, machismo, power and wealth. They took out tigers with reckless abandon, along with their Indian counterparts that ruled (nominally) sovereign “Princely States.” Kings and lords, generals, and Maharajas went out in large parties, carried by 10, 20, 30 or even 40 elephants; their servants often drugged and baited tigers before they arrived so the hunters were in little danger. They legitimized the slaughter by vilifying the cats, casting them as terrible, bloodthirsty beasts with an unquenchable desire for human flesh.

After ascending the throne in 1911, King George V and his retinue traveled north to Nepal, slaying 39 tigers in 10 days. Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale shot more than 300 tigers in India. In the 1920s, Umed Singh II, the Maharaja of Kotah, modified a flaming red Rolls Royce Phantom for tiger safaris in the Rajastani hills, outfitting it with spotlights for night hunting, a mounted machine gun and a Lantaka cannon. Newly-crowned Rewa kings in Central India thought it auspicious to slay 109 tigers after their coronation. Shooting a tiger was a coming-of-age ritual for young Indian princes.

According to historian Mahesh Rangarajan, “over 80,000 tigers…were slaughtered in 50 years from 1875 to 1925. It is possible that this was only a fraction of the numbers actually slain.” Not all were trophy-hunted: In some regions, the cats were considered vermin, systematically exterminated with incentive from government bounties.

The killing escalated after 1947. Independence ushered in a hunting free-for-all similar to the 1880s shooting spree that decimated bison herds on the American plains. Anyone who laid hands on a gun joined in. Soon after, hunters streamed in from around the world, seduced by the guaranteed premiere trophies advertised by travel agencies—tiger, elephant, rhino, lion, and other iconic species. The Maharajas created staggering new hunting records. In a letter, the Maharaja of Surguja told wildlife biologist George Schaller that by 1965, he’d bagged 1,150 tigers. Because the biggest animals made the best trophies, the largest, strongest cats disappeared from the gene pool.

And then, as models and Hollywood starlets draped themselves in cat skin coats, a fashion craze for fur took hold in the U.S. and Europe. A tiger pelt fetched $50 in India during the 1950s; 10 years later, rugs and coats sold for $10,000. When conservationist Anne Wright explored markets in Delhi—where shelves groaned with skins—she found that the vast majority lacked proper permits and were being exported illegally.

Things changed, however, when Indira Gandhi took the reins as prime minister in 1966. She became what tiger expert Valmik Thapar calls “India’s greatest wildlife savior.” She spearheaded a fight against the growing tiger crisis, outlawing the export of skins in 1969 and appointing a Tiger Task Force two years later.

At the close of the 19th century, when Rudyard Kipling penned the Jungle Book, between 50,000 and 100,000 tigers were thought to roam the Indian subcontinent; by 1971, about 1,800 were left alive and the Tiger Task Force predicted they would be extinct by the end of the century. That year, the Delhi High Court banned tiger killing, despite opposition from the trophy hunting industry that was raking in $4 million a year.

Then in 1973, Gandhi launched “Project Tiger,” which still stands as the world’s most comprehensive tiger conservation initiative. She established nine tiger reserves, hired guards to patrol them, and forcibly moved whole villages outside their perimeters.

At the time of Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, tiger numbers topped 4,000, their prey had increased, and India had created a global model for wildlife conservation. “Tigers flourished beyond our wildest dreams,” said Belinda Wright, Anne’s daughter and director of the Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

But by the late 1980s, tigers began to vanish. Rapidly. Biologists and conservationists who reported disappearances to officials were ignored. The seizure of 2,200 pounds of tiger bone (from about 80 tigers) in Delhi in August 1993 revealed what was happening: Poaching for the traditional Chinese medicine trade had hit the Subcontinent, sparking what was being called “the second tiger crisis.” To meet a growing demand for tiger parts, the cats were being poisoned, shot, and snared across India.

Meanwhile, wildlife wardens and Project Tiger officials dismissed the warnings, clinging to inflated population numbers based on flawed data. Their 2002 census counted a whopping 3,642 tigers. They estimated populations from paw prints, an unreliable method known to re-count the same cats multiple times.

But the scandal went public in June 2004 when national headlines proclaimed the unthinkable: Not a single tiger survived in Sariska Tiger Reserve, despite government claims that 18 tigers lived there. When three men were later arrested, they described how easy it was to kill them: Many of the guard’s walkie-talkies were nonfunctional and none of the 300 guards were at their posts during monsoon season. The poachers had even brought in live bait and shot tigers over their kills.

Project Tiger had become, as Valmik wrote, “a success story gone horribly wrong.” A 2006 auditor’s report found the project riddled with corruption and neglect. Funds had been skimmed by state governments for other purposes. Guards that quit or retired were not replaced; 30 percent of posts were vacant and the average ranger was over 50 years old. Those that remained walked dangerous patrols armed with bamboo sticks or ancient Lee-Enfield rifles—50 year-old British Army-issue weapons, outgunned by poachers toting assault rifles or AK-47s. Ultimately, the embarrassment over extinction in Sariska prompted the creation of a new entity, the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The Wildlife Institute of India’s grim 2008 report shocked India and the world with its findings: A far more accurate camera trap survey counted just 1,411 adult tigers—after a $400 million investment over 34 years to save them under Project Tiger. Two years later, a wider census raised tiger estimates to 1,706.

Today there are 45 tiger reserves, comprising about one percent of India’s land. Some hold only a handful of tigers. “Just creating reserves is not a magic wand,” says Deborah Banks, an investigator with the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency. “We still need people, resources, and the political will to protect them.”

Poaching continues to skyrocket, and over the last thee years, tiger deaths (from all causes) have been high: 71 in 2011, an all-time record of 88 in 2012, and 80 in 2013.

A new census is currently underway. India and the world awaits the results: The country is home to over half of all remaining wild tigers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part five of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll explore Asian cultures’ “cult of the tiger”–how tigers have been an iconic symbol of power and courage, woven into culture, religion, folklore and ritual throughout human history.

Talking Tigers: Part 5 of a 12-part series

Throughout human history, the diverse peoples who populated the vast Asian continent have had one thing in common: They feared and revered the tiger. Throughout this cat’s range, their stealthy, illusory habits—suddenly appearing and disappearing in dense forests, often at night—elevated them to the status of otherworldly beings.

For millennia, the largest of the world’s cats has been an iconic symbol of power and courage, woven into culture, religion, folklore and ritual. Teeth, claws and other body parts became amulets. In legend, tigers brought food to men and women lost in the forest; tigers fought the forces of evil, protecting tribes, holy men, babies; tigers acted as a potent agent of fertility—and provided passage between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Nine tiger species once roamed from Siberia’s boreal forests southward to the steamy tropical jungles of Indonesia, and from present-day Turkey all the way to the East China Sea. The earliest fossil, a tiger-like skull unearthed in China, is two million years old.

Neolithic cave paintings are the earliest existing depictions, etched into rock walls across the Indian subcontinent 8,000 years ago and in China’s Helan Mountains; the oldest surviving tiger statue was sculpted in China some 1,000 years later.

Tribal cultures everywhere deified this cat, and it’s no wonder. This magnificent animal is the reigning predator across its range, huge, muscular, possessing fearsome teeth and claws and a roar that resounds for miles. Tigers radiate power. They inspire awe.

That reverence has taken many forms. For the Chinese, the tiger represents the masculine and rules over all the world’s creatures, literally marked by royalty: The four stripes on its forehead form the character wáng, meaning king. The Tibetans believed that tigers held the key to immortality. The Koreans considered them messengers sent by a venerated mountain spirit that appears in paintings as an elderly, white-bearded man—accompanied by a tiger. The Naga tribes in Myanmar and India believed that man and tiger are brothers, one human, the other striped.

For many tribes, killing the beast was an unforgivable sin.

Shaman in many countries invoked tigers to move between worlds in order to communicate with the dead. Accounts from the early 1900s describe “were-tigers” in Sumatra, people who transformed into tigers at nightfall and shape-shifted back into human form at sunrise.

Morphing into a tiger seemed to be a common occurrence across Asia. In India, were-tigers were evil sorcerers, in China were-tigerhood was considered a hereditary curse, and in Thailand, rampaging man-eaters were thought to be angry were-tigers. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the harimau jadian (benevolent were-tigers) that guarded plantations were only dangerous if they were hungry.

The transformation from human to striped feline is described in various fables: It usually began with the feet turning into enormous paws, equipped with sharp, sheathed claws. Legs and arms, chest and back expanded, rippled with muscle, and then the skin was blanketed in russet fur, slashed by black stripes. A tail appeared between the man-cat’s long rear legs. Finally, an enormous tiger head appeared. Back in human form, these people appeared normal, except for one tell-tale physical anomaly: They lacked a groove in their upper lip.

Tigers were widely believed to carry the spirits of the ancestors. Captain Henry Bandesson, who traveled in Annam (modern-day Vietnam) at the turn of the 20^th century, recounted a case where a woman was killed by a tiger that was thought to be inhabited by the soul of her dead, cuckolded husband—and acts of infidelity in her village instantly became very rare.

But tigers were most commonly worshipped as powerful protectors. Many believed that when a tiger slayed a human, their soul entered the animal’s body, transforming it into an everlasting protector that would forever watch over them in time of crisis—so few dared to kill them, even the man-eaters. The Javan tiger, before it went extinct in 1980, guarded the Tree of Life.

Indian mythology is filled with tigers: the tiger fights dragons, brings rain in time of drought, brings babies to the childless and then keeps those children safe from nightmares, and has the ability to heal. In a creation story from the northeast state of Nagaland, the mother of the first spirit, the first tiger and the first man emerged from the earth together through a pangolin’s den.

But worship continues to this day: Vaghadeva, the tiger god, is honored as guardian of the forest, propitiated with offerings of flowers and incense placed on simple rock shrines. In Central India, the Baigas, or Tiger Clan, consider themselves the cat’s descendants. North of Mumbai, the Warli tribe erects wooden tiger statues for use in fertility rites: At harvest time, they decorate them with images of entwined snakes, trees, the moon, stars and the sun—and donate part of the year’s harvest to the tiger as a symbol of life and regeneration.

These cats also watched over the dead. As far back as the 13^th century in China, tiger imagery was etched into tombs and monuments to ward off the malevolent spirits that tormented the deceased. In Chinese folk tales, the cat killed the evil and guarded the good. And in pre-colonial Indochina, the forest-dwelling Moi people endowed them with supernatural powers that required extreme deference: They called the cat ‘his eminence’, ‘lofty one’, ‘the master’, ‘my lord’, or ‘the gentlemen’—but never ‘tiger’.

Bandesson also discovered a belief that the soul of a tiger’s victim is carried around on the tiger’s back—and they carry deities, too. The warrior Hindu goddess Durga, slayer of demons, rides a massive tiger. A tiger helped Chang Tao-Ling (who’s considered the founder of Taoism) to vanquish the king of the demons and amass enough power to ascend to heaven; he, too, rode a tiger.

In art, tigers have been depicted with wings or drawn conjoined with a streaking white star amidst the Milky Way, protecting Earth from above. With their ancient legacy as givers of life, mediums, gods, and guardians, it’s no surprise that for millennia, medicine men of the East have imbued tigers and their parts with untold healing properties. It’s a belief system that has proven deadly, with growing demand for tiger parts pushing tigers towards the brink of extinction.

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up: In part six of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll report on the use of tigers as part of the ancient traditional Chinese medicine apothecary.

Talking Tigers: Part 6 of a 12-part series

For centuries, tigers have inspired awe, reverence and sometimes, terror, in the humans they’ve lived beside. They command the Asian landscape as the top predator—immense, magnificent, muscular animals armed with razored claws and massive canines. They can kill with one swipe of their dinner plate-sized paws or with a strangling bite to the throat of their victim. But they also shimmer with radiant, auburn beauty in the sunlight; sometimes they seem to materialize out of nowhere, hunting under a blanket of night or appearing suddenly from a stand of bamboo, silently stalking their prey at dawn or dusk, shrouded by ghostly mists or by failing light, the jungle’s apparition.

With this great power and mystery, tribal cultures worshipped tigers, bestowing them with powers that extend far beyond those of any worldly creature. Tigers became gods—and healers. For millennia, medicine men have ascribed magical powers and medicinal properties to them, and somehow, this cat became a universal apothecary. Many believe (and some still do) that by ingesting it, you absorb an animal’s life force, its vigor, strength, and attributes.

Nearly every part of this cat, from nose to tail ‎ (eyes, whiskers, brains, flesh, blood, organs and more) has been used to treat a lengthy list of maladies. Tiger parts are purported to heal the liver and kidneys, to cure everything from epilepsy, baldness, toothaches, joint pain and boils to ulcers, nightmares, fevers, and headaches. They’re also used to treat rat bites and laziness and are thought to prevent possession by evil demons. Tiger penis is said to have aphrodisiac powers.

The hu gu (Mandarin for bones) are the parts that are most highly prized in Oriental medicine, a favored treatment for rheumatism and arthritis—and for impotence and flagging libido. But the humerus is the most coveted section of a tiger skeleton: That upper front leg bone is believed to contain the most potent healing powers.

Once they’re stripped of flesh, the bones are ground into powder, then used in pills, plasters, and as part of remedies containing other ingredients. A standard oral dosage for rheumatic pain is three to six grams a day. Over a year, that’s somewhere between six and a half and 13 pounds of bone—which is also used in wine.

There is a growing, clamoring demand for tiger bone wine, a tonic made by steeping a tiger carcass in rice wine to produce an extremely expensive elixir. It’s thought to impart the animal’s great strength, a status symbol product bought or gifted by the elite: government officials, military officers, and wealthy businessmen.

Although China banned the use of tiger bone in 1993 and removed it from the list of approved medicines, manufacture and sale of tiger bone wine never stopped. Labels may picture a tiger,  bottles may be tiger-shaped, but the word “tiger” has disappeared from packaging, replaced by “lion” ingredients—or it’s called “bone-strengthening wine.” Without DNA tests on any bone bits that might have remained in the liquid, there’s no way to know what exactly it’s made from, but ongoing media reports coming out of China document dealers offering tiger bone wine to customers.

Some of these are ancient remedies prescribed for well over 1,000 years—some say traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originated perhaps as long as 5,000 years ago. According to legend, as human civilization emerged, Heaven sent a number of “sage-kings” to teach the people how to survive in a hostile world. One of these sage kings, Shen Nong Shi (3000 B.C.), created medicine by ingesting plants and discovering which served as drugs. As Chinese medical practice evolved, circulation of qi—energy—became  paramount, along with balance of yin and yang, the opposite principles in nature, and a focus on the function and the intricate relationships between five organs: kidneys, lungs, liver, heart, and spleen.

TCM ingredients include a wide range of plants, herbs, minerals, and parts from over 1,500 animals, including tigers and other endangered species—more than 6,000 substances in all. Demand for some of the most highly prized items, including rhino horn, pangolin scales, and tiger parts, has nearly hunted these creatures off the planet. The first reference in China to tiger bone medicine dates to 500 A.D., published in the Collection of Commentaries on the Classic of the Materia Medica. 

The appetite for animal parts used in TCM skyrocketed in tandem with China’s expanding industrialization in the 1980s. As the country’s population approached 1.2 billion, newfound wealth and greater spending power fueled the demand as interest in traditional cures resurged: Their use garnered prestige.

Initially, tiger parts came from  huge local stockpiles. In 1950, some 4,000 South China tigers roamed the country; but at the end of that decade, as part of the People’s Republic of China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong declared the cats to be one of the four pests that threatened progress. He organized and championed eradication campaigns, and within a few years, just 1,000 remained. The remaining  population dwindled and ultimately crashed.  A  South China tiger has not been spotted by biologists or government officials in the wild for over 35 years.

China’s stockpiles of tiger ingredients eventually ran low and beginning around 1986, the cats began to mysteriously disappear elsewhere. Professional poachers fanned out, shooting, snaring, and trapping their way across tiger range. India was a prime target, with close proximity to China—which is still, by far, the largest consumer of tiger parts and at the time, was the largest manufacturer and exporter of medicines containing tiger derivatives. In 1986, China’s People’s Daily newspaper reported that 116 factories were producing medicinal wine.

Poachers targeted locations where corruption was rife, enforcement weak, and where there were few other economic opportunities. They hired locals to hunt the cats or act as guides, then ran the parts and pelts over borders to Chinese TCM manufacturers and dealers. A huge pipeline was shipping wildlife to East Asia, especially China, the trade run by international crime syndicates—and driven by monstrous, staggering economics.

But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that field biologists and conservationists realized that TCM was responsible for what had become a precipitous decline in tiger numbers. It was a shocking seizure of tiger and leopard bones in Delhi, India in 1993 that revealed the severity of the threat and the mushrooming trade: 882 pounds of tiger and leopard bones (about 30 animals’ worth), eight tiger skins and 43 leopard skins. A Tibetan refugee arrested in the sting had agreed to supply an undercover agent with 2,200 pounds of bones—about 80 tigers.

Tigers were classified as globally endangered in 1986. The following year, a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) treaty banned cross-border trade in tiger parts. From 1990 to 1992, China exported some 27 million units of tiger medicines and wine to 26 countries, according to TRAFFIC, a nonprofit that documents illegal wildlife trade. Tiger remedies were seen in pharmacies in Asian communities all over the world.

China formally banned domestic trade of tiger bone in 1993. The next year, some Chinese medical practitioners publicly repudiated the use and efficacy of tiger remedies; today, very few pharmacies still openly carry remedies containing tiger products. But the market slipped underground and shadowy networks still thrive. Though tiger hunting is illegal everywhere, the killing has continued, and in some places, it’s accelerated.

Prices for tigers, dead or alive, continue to soar as populations collapse. Poaching for their bones (and skins) has become a primary threat to their survival.

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A partial list of traditional medicine uses for tiger parts: 

Bile: Used to treat convulsions in children

Blood: Used to strengthen the constitution and build willpower

Bone: Used as an anti-inflammatory to arthritis, rheumatism, back problems, general weakness, or headaches; also considered a powerful tonic

Brain: A treatment for laziness and pimples

Claws: A sedative for sleeplessness

Eyeballs: A treatment for malaria and epilepsy, nervousness or fevers in children, convulsions and cataracts

Fat: Prescribed for dog bites, vomiting, hemorrhoids

Feces: A cure for boils, hemorrhoids and alcoholism

Flesh: Used to treat nausea and malaria, to bring vitality and tone the stomach and spleen

Feet: Used to ward off evil spirits

Fur: Is burnt to drive away centipedes

Nose leather: Used to treat bites and other superficial wounds, for epilepsy and children’s convulsions

Penis: Used as an aphrodisiac or love potion

Skin: Used to cure fever caused by ghosts and mental illness

Stomach: Prescribed for stomach upsets

Teeth: Prescribed for rabies, asthma, and genital sores

Tail: Used to cure skin diseases

Whiskers: Used to treat toothaches

(Source: KILLED FOR A CURE: A Review of the Worldwide Trade in Tiger Bone.)

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up:  In In part seven of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll report on the demand that’s feeding tiger poaching.

Talking Tigers: Part 7 of a 12-part series

Young, healthy tigers jump through rings of fire, sit upright on cue, clawing at the air, and perform other well-choreographed circus tricks. Enthusiastic crowds cheer. After the show, some pay extra to hold small, cuddly cubs. 

But those who visit these tiger attractions in China have no idea of the suffering behind the scenes or the dark commerce that keeps them afloat.

If they were to slip behind the scenes, they’d see concentration-camp level suffering. Huge numbers of tigers are crammed into barred, concrete quarters or packed into dusty, treeless compounds behind chain link fences. Most of the cats are gaunt, wasted to striped skin and bone. Some are grossly deformed by inbreeding or poor nutrition. Some are blind.

Tiger Farms

Many of these operations are run as tourist destinations—and may masquerade as conservation initiatives—but these facilities are essentially factories that breed tigers for the commercial sale of their parts.

The country’s 200 or so “tiger farms” are working overtime to meet a new, growing market: Tiger products have become coveted status symbols among China’s elite, much like sporting a Rolex watch or serving a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

Tiger farms are supplying a shadowy underground trade, which “serves only to stimulate consumer demand, creating a massive enforcement challenge and wholly undermining the efforts of the international community to protect tigers,” says Shruti Suresh, a wildlife campaigner with the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency.

A tiger carcass is now worth a small fortune. With just 3,000 tigers (from six different subspecies) left in the wild, this luxury market could be the death knell for wild tigers.

Buying or gifting expensive tiger products has become a fashionable way to gain favor or flaunt wealth and power among China’s most influential people, a group that reportedly includes wealthy businessmen, government officials and military officers. China is, by far, the largest consumer of tiger and many other endangered species parts.

It’s created a growing clamor for tiger pelts that are used in high-end décor and for tiger bone wine, made by marinating a tiger skeleton in rice wine—which can sell for $500 a bottle. Tiger meat is sometimes served at fashionable dinner parties where guests may have been treated to a “visual feast” before eating: watching their entrée killed and butchered before them.

For decades, tiger derivatives used in traditional Chinese medicine drove the black market trade. Today, tiger parts are “consumed less as medicine and more as exotic luxury products,” according to a recent report. “ ‘Wealth’ [is] replacing ‘health’ as a primary form of consumer motivation,” it says. With tigers and other Asian big cats rapidly disappearing, the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) commissioned the report for review at a Standing Committee meeting in Geneva last July.

This current enterprise isn’t about upholding sacred cultural tradition. Nor is it providing necessary medical treatment, says Lixin Huang, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

It’s simply about money, influence and speculation.

Industrial-scale tiger farming makes millions of dollars for a handful of people. Some speculators are collecting tiger skin rugs and cases of tiger bone wine (vintage brewed from wild tigers is most valuable), watching their investment grow as the numbers of wild tigers dwindle. They’re banking on extinction.

Meanwhile, tiger farming is a booming business. About twice as many tigers are living miserable, caged lives in China as  all of the world’s remaining wild tigers put together. The country’s captive tiger population has skyrocketed from about 20 in 1986 to between 5,000 and 6,000 today. (Three other countries also farm tigers, but on a radically smaller scale. Vietnam is thought to hold 127, Lao PDR, 400, and Thailand, 1,000. They, too, trade illegally in tigers.)

Captive tigers are not insurance against extinction: they in no way help wild populations. They’re badly interbred and a tiger raised by humans has never been successfully reintroduced to the wild.

“A lot of biologists view farmed tigers as already dead because they have nothing to do with conservation,” says Judy Mills, author of the forthcoming book “Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species.”

Industrial breeding facilities, “speed-breed” to boost production: mothers usually birth two to three cubs; if they’re promptly taken from her, she can bear another litter in as little as five months.  Just one breeding center, the Heilongjiang Siberian Tiger Garden in northeast Heilongjiang Province, is expecting 100 cubs to be born over the coming year.

The largest of these, the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village in Guilin, held about 1,500 tigers at last count in 2010. Seed financing came from China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) when it launched in 1993. Ironically, this agency both enforces wildlife protection—and promotes farming of endangered species.

Tiger farming is legitimate business, sanctioned under a 1989 law that encourages breeding and utilization of wildlife. Sales of tiger bone and other tiger parts were, in theory, banned in 1993. However, it seems that commercial tiger breeding facilities are essentially skin and bone farms.

At July’s CITES Standing Committee meeting, Chinese officials finally admitted what the world has known for some time: they are licensing sales of tiger pelts. In 2013, EIA revealed that legally-issued permits are regularly reused, making it disturbingly easy to launder skins from tigers killed in India and elsewhere. In addition to selling pelts, many tiger farms stockpile frozen carcasses—and brew tiger bone wine from their skeleton supply.

But it’s even worse than that. A factory in Changsha appears to be cranking out tiger bone wine. EIA investigators discovered that the Hunan Sanhong Biotechnology Company in Changsha is apparently manufacturing “Real Tiger Wine” on a commercial scale. Evidence suggests that the State Forestry Administration and other agencies secretly authorized the venture—and sales are not public: regional agents distribute directly to elite clients, including restaurants and guesthouses catering to high-ranking government officials.

The recent CITES report corroborates this. “Internal trading privileges” are allowed for companies dealing in tiger skins and body parts “produced mainly but not exclusively from captive breeding,” it says.

Exactly how many tigers it takes to supply a wine factory—and China’s luxury market—is anyone’s guess. But this illegal enterprise could not be thriving if government officials were not involved, invested, benefitting—or turning a blind eye. It’s become a national embarrassment for China, flying in the face of efforts by President Xi Jinping to root out corruption.

Despite claims that they have completely curbed international trafficking, the country has done little to disrupt the crime networks that control the illegal transnational trade in tiger parts—or to eliminate the nation’s voracious appetite for tiger parts and products, says Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

Wildlife trafficking, now valued at about $19 billion a year, has traditionally ranked low on most governments’ list of priorities. But the ongoing massacre of elephants and rhinos has grabbed headlines and sparked action. (Though fewer tigers are being killed, there are far less left to kill—and they hover closer to extinction.)

An international summit in London in January brought together ministers and heads of state from 50 nations to galvanize a global fight against wildlife crime. They signed a declaration stating that, “Poaching and trafficking undermines the rule of law and good governance, and encourages corruption. It is an organised and widespread criminal activity, involving transnational networks.”

In 2013, Achim Steiner, who heads the United Nations Environment Program, called for a global crackdown, and the U.N. Security Council, General Assembly and other U.N. bodies have taken notice. Interpol is now leading global enforcement operations.

Large conservation organizations claim to be be saving tigers, but the fact is that numbers continue to plummet—and the Chinese demand for tiger products is wiping them out faster than any other threat.

Tiger experts agree that without urgent action to phase out tiger farms and end all commerce in tigers from all sources, wild tigers will disappear—and soon.

WildAid, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that combats illegal wildlife trade, says it very succinctly, with film stars Jackie Chan and Jiang Wen speaking up for tigers. Their message is broadcast in public service announcements, posted on billboards and Tweeted across social media: “When the buying stops, the killing can, too.”

For more information: Check out the July 2014 report,                                                            “Caged Assets: Tiger Farming and Trade.”

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Follow Sharon Guynup on Twitter: @sguynup

Next up:  In part eight of the Talking Tigers series, I’ll share new information on a threat to one of the most endangered tiger subspecies–the Siberian tiger.