World Wildlife Fund

July 21, 2006 12:00 p.m. EST

Operator: Mr. Lalley, please go ahead.

Tom Lalley: Good afternoon or for some of you, good morning and welcome to another in a series of conference calls to bring you closer to WWF's work and let you share how your contributions are being used. My name is Tom Lalley. I'm a Communications Officer here at WWF and I'll be moderating the call today.

You were invited to be on this call because of your continuing support of WWF's work. Your support makes our work possible and all of us here at World Wildlife Fund thank you for your support. We're talking today about a ground-breaking new report on wild tigers written by WWF and other scientists.

The report found that wild tigers have vanished from more than 40 percent of the places they were estimated to live just a decade ago. But the report also found good news: conservation efforts have resulted in some populations remaining stable or even increasing.

We have two guests today: Eric Dinerstein, Chief Scientist and Vice President for Science at World Wildlife Fund and Author of the new book Tiger Land and Other Destinations, and Colby Loucks, a Senior Conservation Specialist in WWF's Conservation Science Department. We'll hear from them in a moment, but first a few points on logistics.

This call is scheduled to last an hour and we'll try to keep as close to on time as possible. Also, please note - know that a transcript of this call will be published on WWF's website, but participant names will not be used.

And now, I'll hand things over to Eric. After he speaks, we'll get right to your questions.

Eric Dinerstein: Thanks Tom, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for listening today and participating, and I think that I can speak for everybody in saying that we're delighted with the reaction that we've had in the news media in response to the dramatic results that we recorded yesterday.

As I said in the opening statements that we made, if Wall Street traded in a commodity called tiger of futures then yesterday would have been Black Thursday because of the two pieces of news that we had to announce based on our comprehensive two-year study of tiger presence and tiger habitats: that overall, tigers are now restricted to only seven percent of their historic range, and, most importantly, in the last decade, the tiger occupancy is down 40 percent from what we estimated 10 years ago when we did our first range wide assessment of tigers.

So this is really a call to arms for all of us and I think that one of the points that we really tried hard to bring home was the policy implications of what the science is telling us, which is that we really need to think about developing and promoting a tiger summit, a gathering of government leaders from tiger countries to get together and make a commitment to save tigers forever.

We need something that we can build on as a model, which we did very successfully for the Yaounde Summit that was really pivotal for changing the course of conservation in the Congo Basin, so nothing less is needed here in Asia.

Tom Lalley: OK. Well, Eric, actually if you could talk a bit more about the Tiger Summit and what are the next steps? I mean, obviously the news is not good, but the question is, what do we do from here?

Eric Dinerstein: OK. Let me take a step back and say that while the news is not good, in terms of aggregate if the overall study shows a decline, that can sometimes mask areas where tigers' conditions are actually improving or where there are more tigers today than there were 10 or 20 years ago.

That's certainly the case with this study in that we can point to a number of places that we talk about in the report, places where we think that-we know that-tigers are doing better, and places that can probably have as many as 500 breeding tigers over the long term. Some of these include places where WWF is quite active like the Terai Arc landscape in Southern Nepal and Northern India, the Russian Far East, the Tenasserim Range that is the range of mountains that goes down the peninsula in Southeast Asia and Thailand and Myanmar, and the large drive for a complex in Cambodia ' s dry forests.

So there are clearly opportunities here for doing large scale conservations and bringing I think some of the other places that aren't doing as well to learn the lessons from what works in the places where we are succeeding, and try to extend that across the range.

So while this report does identify places where tigers are in decline and where we were quite honestly surprised by the low occupancy of tigers such as in the dry forests in Cambodia which we thought would be a stronghold - parts of Cambodia anyway - that there are places that we can point to where I think things can work very well.

As far as the Tiger Summit goes, maybe for those who are not so familiar with the work that WWF did years ago in the Congo Basin, we recognize that a lot of the efforts that we were doing there were somewhat disjointed, a little bit ad hoc, were not well funded, and not well enough coordinated among the different conservation groups and government agencies that were working there. So what we did was to put together a broad vision for conservation showing what success would look like in the Congo Basin, and this became the basis for the convocation of leaders for the Yaounde Summit. And what happened after this group got together was that the President of Gabon identified 13 new national parks to be created and other leaders followed suit.
It led to a dramatic increase in funding through the USA's Congo Basin Forest Partnerships that help finance conservation across large areas. And we identified 12 large landscapes for conservation that would be large enough and intact enough to conserve the wildlife of the Congo Basin in perpetuity.

So we felt that this was a great model to use, and very timely for our work for tiger conservation because we have the same set of issues. A lot of the important areas we identified for tiger conservation are transboundary-they span more than one country, typically because a lot of the remaining habitat is often located on the borders of countries-and we have to address the illegal trade issues because they are also transboundary and require meetings of all the range state leaders.

By bringing together the major donors of range state leaders, we can also better finance tiger conservation. So we think that we already have a model in place of how to make this work and can see this as the culmination of the two years of research that we've done to bring these results to the public.

Tom Lalley: Are there any questions out there?

WWF Supporter 3: Yes. I commend you for your work on this and so much more. My question has to do with the lessons that have been learned, and how is it that there are some strongholds amidst the expanding human populations and tremendous stress on those landscapes?

Eric Dinerstein: That's a good question, thanks. I think that some of this has to do with where the strongholds are located. In some cases, they are in very remote areas such as the Russian Far East, you know, the very low density of the tiger population and it's an area that really hasn't been heavily exploited for timber or for other resources. So it's a place that has remained more or less intact although that could be rapidly changing. And we can only look across the border at what would be called Manchurian China, which is potentially the same habitat as in the Russian Far East, but is almost completely gone because of the dramatic exploitation on that side of the border.

But if you go to other areas, like to the Terai Arc landscape, the reason why we think that tigers have persisted for a long time, there or in other parts of the Indian subcontinents, is that quite honestly there has been a long history of tiger and wildlife conservation. Dating back from the early days of the royal hunt for the maharajas, those areas became hunting reserves and then national parks, so you've had this long tradition of conservation and protection. And tigers are basically big cats and breed faster than their prey, and they come back very quickly when afforded the protection.

If you contrast that say with the tiger habitats and the range states that are Indochina and Southeast Asia, they never had that long history of conservation that's part of more recent culture, so it's been a much harder effort. And of course, a number of them have been subjects of major outbreaks of unrest or warfare and so consequently you had a decline through poaching of tiger prey, which ultimately leads to a decline of tigers.

So it's those issues I think, the remoteness and the longer history of conservation in the subcontinents, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh than compared, to say the habitats in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which didn't have that history.

Colby Loucks: To add to the points Eric made is that there's also disproportionate large number of the tiger landscapes now found in montane areas and what's been happening is that most of the the lowland areas that are more applicable for other economic activities such as agriculture or where that people want to live have undergone tremendous habitat loss.

This has pushed wildlife, not only tigers but all kinds of wildlife, into the more remote areas, as Eric mentioned, and most of these are in the mountainous areas such as the Western Thailand, the Russian Far East that he mentioned, and mountain ranges in Laos and Sumatra.

Tom Lalley: Are there other questions? If so, please go ahead.

WWF Supporter 4: I wondered what are the successes in managing human-tiger conflict other than separate spaces? Is it possible to manage these where they're both in the same habitat?

Eric Dinerstein: We like to think that-we know that tigers have lived in close proximity to people for eons. The Gangetic Plain of India was settled in 1400 AD and so you've had a long history of Asian people living in close proximity to their mega fauna; not just tigers, but elephants and rhinos and wild cattle and leopards and other species. And we think that can still continue. It really comes down to a question of zoning, and I think that gets us to the heart of your question which is, how are we able to look at not just individual sites but larger landscapes so that we can zone these areas where if for example there are productive lowlands that need to be used for rice cultivation, they are zoned in an appropriate way. But enough area is kept in natural habitat to preserve the natural capital there, so for things like preventing floods by having riparian forests along rivers that break the course of the Monsoon floods that would normally just inundate farmers' fields. And there is no reason why these same forests can't maintain healthy populations of tigers and elephants and rhinos.

It's just simply a matter of making sure that we have the proper zonation so that there is enough habitat for these species. There's also an opportunity to provide compensation for livestock losses, and we've had experiments with that in a number of places where tigers are taking livestock. If we can bring the natural prey back up to levels that were seen before, tigers only rarely take livestock. It's usually when there isn't enough natural prey available and I think that we can think about in the present and future offering other financial incentives that can make tigers-as the term we like to use-worth more alive than dead. This can be through ecotourism which has been demonstrated across a large part of their range-particularly in the subcontinents, where tiger ecotourism has been a major source of generating revenue. The challenge here is making sure that revenues get back to the local people who actually live next to the tigers.

WWF Supporter 5: This is [a WWF supporter]. I have a question: I was wondering how much the just threat of traditional Chinese medicine and poaching for that purpose is still a factor, and if so, is the Chinese Government amenable at all to working with conservation groups and mitigating that?

Ginette Hemley: Hi everybody. This is Ginette Hemley. I'm with the Species Provision Program here at WFF. I'll jump in on that one since I've spent a number of years working on wildlife trade issues.

The trade threat to tigers for the use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine is indeed an ongoing issue. Our strategy, which we've seen some success in even though challenges remain, has been to try to engage the leadership of traditional Chinese medicine communities and sectors in China, so you're absolutely right-China is at the core of this in driving this trade threat. We had a very important breakthrough in the late 90's, 1999, in China, through the first ever gathering of leaders of traditional Chinese medicine and conservationists that did lead to some commitments on the part of the Chinese government to legally remove the tiger parts and tiger bone that is traditionally used in these medicines from traditional medicine in China. Our task now is to make sure that that commitment is fully followed through on, and it's been a challenge, but we have seen some progress. In market surveys that have been conducted through our wildlife trade program TRAFFIC we have collected data to show measured declines in the availability of medicinal products in traditional medicine, so we're continuing work on that front with traditional medicine leadership.

A new threat that relates to this has emerged in the last couple of years where it's been an issue that has taken on more attention, and that is the issue of tiger "farming" in China. Because tigers breed quite readily and easily in captivity, there are tigers that the Chinese have kept for the purpose of both entertainment, but also for the use of the bones of tigers that die naturally in captivity for use in traditional medicine. And the Chinese have-at the government level-been exploring the possibility of opening their own internal market for the sale of these products of tigers coming off of these so-called farms, which of course, is a hugely controversial issue and one that we are much engaged on, actively and strongly opposing and trying to make sure that the government doesn't do that.

So it's an ongoing challenge. We are addressing it, but you're right, that it is something that we need to keep our eye on as a priority for conservation.

WWF Supporter 6: This is [a WWF supporter]. I'm wondering about success stories in bringing back small populations, noting these are cat statements, and wondering about the conservation science community, are they at consensus about the subspecies and the value of preserving unique subspecies?

Eric Dinerstein: There are eight recognized subspecies of tigers that scientists use to classify them below the level of species. We've actually avoided using the subspecies designation and this is why, for a couple of reasons. First is that there are ecological differences-call them a suite of adaptations that tigers have for living in different habitats. So tigers that live in the deep snow of the Russian Far East and hunt musk deer and red deer, or where tigers prey on moose, have a different suite of adaptation than tigers that walk through the 26 foot tall grasslands at the base of the Himalayas, that are different than tigers that swim between mangrove islands in the Sundarbans that are almost semi-aquatic. And tigers that live in the dry forest of Cambodia or the tropical moist forest of the Western Indochina or Southern India or Sumatra. It's this different suite of adaptations to hunting different prey, being exposed to different diseases, different climatic conditions, living in different habitats, that are as vital to conserve as any sort of subspecies designation.

What we did in doing our first study 10 years ago, and in this study as well, is to preserve these suites of adaptations that we put under one word that we've created, if you'll excuse this jargon, we call it "tigerness," so it captures the uniqueness of these adaptations among tigers across their range. That's a fundamental tenet of our approach to conserving them.

As to conserving small populations, one could argue that the whole science of conservation biology is the science of scarcity and diversity, and so scarcity often includes populations of species that are low numbered. Some of the advantages or some of the issues that you always want to think about when you conserve populations or try to restore populations that are at low numbers are first, what's their reproductive rate? And second, how large are the species? And third, how specialized are they in their habitat requirements? And what we have going for us with tigers, remarkably, even though that they are the world's largest ((inaudible)) carnivore, is that with wolves, they are the two large carnivores that breed faster than their prey. So a tiger can have, in ideal conditions, a new litter every year, and they can have up to five cubs and often they get survival of at least three of them. You compare that with the reproductive rate of their prey and it's much faster, so we've seen tigers rebound very, very quickly.

The other really important feature here is that outside of the rain forest and the other habitats, these habitats tend to be extremely dynamic and come back very quickly from disturbance, and so we're not talking so much about trying to restore say orangutans or mature forest dependent hornbills, kind of large forest birds, that would probably take generations of patience to see the recovery of species.

Or if we didn't look at tigers, if we went into the marine realm and looked at say tiger sharks, the top predators in marine systems, they have very, very slow reproductive rates. They reach sexual maturity at a much later age. They have only a few young in their lifetime and in some places that have been fished out of sharks, it may take 100 years to recover shark populations. We can see tiger populations rebound in 2 to 3 years. One example of that would be in the Russian Far East where in the 1940's there were an estimated 40 to 50 tigers, and now there are between 400 and 500. And we know that tigers can also occur in very high densities, even though they're very territorial, they can occur in very high densities in places where their prey is extremely abundant.

And my favorite statistic, although it's a little gruesome, gives indication of how abundant tigers once were: In the royal hunt in Chitwan National Park - where I worked - in December of 1937 through January of 1938 when the maharajas came to shoot tigers, they shot 125 tigers in a relatively small area. That gives you a sense of just how abundant tigers can be in areas that have been well protected.

Colby Loucks: As Eric stated, I think tigers are really catholic in their use of habitats, so they don't need the primeval forest to survive, but they tend to be able to survive in some disturbed habitats which allows us to start to connect protected areas through the use of corridors by working with communities to grow trees or alluvial grasslands. They don't have to be 100-year-old forests. They can start to go through some of these areas that are only maybe five or 10 years removed from agriculture and that's what is so hopeful for us, to be able to help work with local communities to establish these corridors by encouraging the growing of forests and forest plantations, which would bring back the prey and then the tigers following the prey into these areas. So that's one way that we're hoping to conserve small populations and start to connect small populations, so hopefully they will become bigger and connected populations.

WWF Supporter 7: This is [a WWF supporter]. What is the reaction-or have the countries had a chance to react to study-particularly in those areas where you want to emphasize the restoration?

Eric Dinerstein: I think it really varies. Probably the gold standard for us in conservation is when we come up with a science-based approach to conserving species or habitats and the governments not only adopt them, but they write them into their five-year development plans. And that's certainly the case for the Terai Arc at least on the Nepal part of that where the configuration of the reserves and the corridors that connects the tiger reserves have been written into law and are part of their ongoing development efforts.

In the country of Bhutan, the altitudinal corridor that we have created is the only place left where tigers prey on the same species as snow leopards where they go right up the timberlines, which is a phenomenon that used to occur throughout the Himalayas. But now it's just restricted pretty much to Bhutan, that these areas are also protected such that the conservation of these altitudinal corridors is written into the Bhutanese constitution. That's one extreme of the best possible scenario of what we hope to achieve and how our conservation measures are embraced and incorporated. At the other end are places where we don't have very good control of the situation, and there is a ramp-up in poaching; that certainly has been the case in large parts of Indochina where we've seen a tremendous off-take of tigers. So, I think that part of this effort towards the Tiger Summit will be to highlight the success stories and think about how we can really emulate those and spread them across the regions.

Eric Dinerstein: I'll throw in here a new piece of information that isn't in the report, isn't even published yet, but as biologists we found really fascinating. One of the scientists who contributed to this study, Dr. Ullas Karanth who, in many people's and my opinion too, is the world's leading tiger biologist, has studied tigers for many years in the Nagarhole National Park in Southern India. His long-term studies have shown that in areas of the better productive tiger populations, i.e., those with very high prey densities, that tiger populations can withstand off-take of up to 20 percent per year and still remain stable, which is really extraordinary. That means that 20 percent of the population is lost through either animals moving outside the population or dying, whether because of natural causes or some poaching; that up to 20 percent, the reproductive rate of tigers can replace that population each year. That's a very productive habitat.

Whether that can be extended across all the tiger's range is not clear, although I just had an e-mail conversation with him today in which we talked about the potential of other places. One of the concerns, if you take places like Indochina where you have these dry forests and some of the tropical evergreen forests that we don't think of as productive as say the grasslands at the base of the Himalayas, or the area where Ullas works in, in the Western Ghats. One of the things that he pointed out is that back in the time when they built Angkor Wat that the densities of the large wild cattle, the banteng the couprey elephant, the forest deer, rhinos, et cetera, probably rivaled the densities that you see in the subcontinent right now. Poaching has so heavily affected the great species of tigers in Indochina and in Sumatra that we just don't see those densities at all., and if we did, we'd probably see equally high densities of tigers as well.

Colby Loucks: Eric's tidbit reminded me of another tidbit. Sybille Klenzendorf, Director of Species Programs, just had a baby or else she would be here on this call with us, but she said that in one of our priority areas , Tesso Nilo. We're funding a Ph.D. student name Sunarto to do research, and what we're trying to find there is in reference to one of the last remaining lowland habitats of Sumatran rain forest. It's surrounded by acacia and oil palm plantations; the oil pump is for palm oil. It's just used in cooking and the acacia plantations are being planted to feed some pulp and paper mills on the island of Sumatra. The issue we wanted to explore was, do tigers use these plantations because in a sense, can live in plantation forests. Do tigers use these? Are they viable places where tigers can survive? Some preliminary results from this research is that what they seem to do is rush in to the very edges of these plantations, maybe take a deer or some small bit of prey, but then return to the natural forests. They need the intact forest or these natural lowland forests to survive. So they're in fact not using these plantations except in the very marginal edges as they are right beside natural forests, which is a huge implication to the connectivity of Sumatra's rain forests.

So that's another one of the kind of findings that are not quite out yet, but we just sort of are trying to explore in some of the other areas we're going into.

Tom Lalley: I have two questions: are tigers going extinct, and how many tigers are in the wild? These are two of the questions that we get all the time.

Eric Dinerstein: Those are the questions that despite being on best behavior, all the reporters eventually came around to ask us and we told them, don't ask us those questions because we don't have very good answers to them-the basis of our report was really to focus on the presence of tigers across their range and relative densities. It wasn't to do absolute count. We could come up with the one number that everybody wants to hear, but since we're always forced into a corner and have to say something, I think it is fair to say that the answer is estimates between 5,000-7,000 tigers in the wild, which is what most conservationists used to express maybe five years ago. If we simply think about how we had a 40 percent decline in occupancy of tiger habitat over the last 10 years, then that number has to be down from that. And I personally would be surprised if there are more than 4,000 tigers left in the wild, but probably a much more sobering statistic is one that we also like to use: There are more tigers alive in private hands today in the state of Texas than there are in the wild.

Having said that, tigers are extremely resilient and quite wily and will survive under most conditions-not as wily in survival as to say leopards are, which you can find almost anywhere, but if there is just enough prey around, tigers can persist for a long time. One of the conclusions of our report is that tigers are not going to go extinct as a species any time soon. What we will see is tiger populations blinking out across their range and I suppose our darkest fear is that we end up with essentially only tigers thriving in the places that we've identified as a stronghold for tiger conservations. With their highly productive rate and their secretive behavior, it's hard to eradicate tigers, but the easiest way to do that of course is to kill off all their prey. If tigers then start resorting to say taking domestic stock, then it could typically poison their shot and that's the end of them. Keeping the healthy prey base is really essential and it's probably going to be part of the return to tactics that we used before when we recovered tiger population, which was to back up their prey population. And if we do that, we almost don't have to worry about tigers so much because they'll find a way to exist in a lot of places.

WWF Supporter 9: So what's the sort of number one or two threats to their prey then? Is it still sport hunting, or is it development and then loss of the prey's habitats?

Eric Dinerstein: It depends where you are. In the Russian Far East, there is a long tradition of sport hunting, of red deer and wild boar, which are two of the major prey items. The red deer are basically like our elk, two of the major prey items for tigers in those areas. Part of the recovery of tigers in the Russian Far East has been not just the reduction of illegal poaching of tigers, but it's been a better regulation and enforcement of hunting laws of the wild hoofed animals that form the prey base of the tigers. In other parts of their range, it's really subsistence that the deer and the boar are mostly killed for direct consumption by poor people, the equivalent in Asia of the bush meat market. But again, in some of these really productive habitats, you can still have some degree of subsistent hunting, illegal, and still have the recovery going on. But it makes you think about if there were actually very good enforcement just how quickly tigers would rebound. Instead of talking about 'Black Thursday,' this could be in 10 years one of the great success stories in conservation-if we just apply some strict protection in a number of core breeding areas for tigers because we've already seen in the past 25 years, episodes of dramatic recovery when we've done this. We apply protection measures and tigers come back very quickly.

WWF Supporter 7: So how do you do that? I mean, how do you preserve the prey?

Eric Dinerstein: Basically, just by patrolling and keeping the domestic livestock out of natural habitats, out of the park. People often talk about the problems or the controversy or the challenges associated with growing human populations and that tigers often are found, at least in the Indian subcontinents, on some of the highest density human populations on earth, and that is true. What keeps the tigers around is that these are all some of the most productive environments, but another piece of this conservation puzzle is the huge numbers of domestic livestock, the millions and millions of cattle and sheep and goats that are out there grazing away on the vegetation that the natural prey of tigers could be eating. And that's a huge issue, one that we're approaching by encouraging more and more of what we call 'stall feeding' of cattle and other livestock, so that if you provide farmers with much more valuable and profitable strains or breeds of livestock, it's in their interest to keep them tied up at home. And it is better to feed them in their stalls rather than let them wander aimlessly across the grasslands or the areas outside parks, or even let them wander illegally inside parks where they could be killed by tigers. This has a number of enormous benefits in that these stall-fed cattle produce much more milk; those animals that are raised for meat produce much more meat and they're more valuable. They reduce the conflict between tigers and domestic stock. They minimize the potential spread of disease from wild stock to domestic stock, and give these areas a chance to recover so that the wild prey of tigers can come back.

One of the things that we're going to be experimenting with in the next year is not only trying to get more cattle stall-fed around reserves, but actually paying local communities an agreed-upon price to help restore the natural grasslands outside parks that are really sort of the engines for driving tiger productivity. So what we're trying to do is to figure out what it is worth for local communities to allow tigers to come back in these grasslands that are in their neighborhoods and on their boundaries that are essential to bringing tigers back across their range.

WWF Supporter 7: Do you deal with the government or do you deal with the federal government or with the local states or what?

Eric Dinerstein: A lot of this is decentralized so that you're dealing with either district leaders and actually even down to what are called 'village user groups' or 'village development committees,' which is the lowest level of the hierarchy where you have elected councils of leaders of surrounding villages who make decisions on behalf of a cluster of villages. That's who we're often working with at that scale. But clearly getting support at the national level is very important for getting new legislation.

One of the reasons we could even begin to think about reconnecting the forest is that the Nepal government passed national legislation that allowed for these local village committees to petition for use of these agricultural lands that are essentially government land given to the people on long-term leases to manage for their own benefit, if they come up with management plans that also help manage for conservations. It is really an effort on multi-levels, from the federal to help change legislation, introduce new legislation and get enforcement, and then down to the district level, and then down to the local level.

I think WWF is so effective as a conservation organization because we have somebody who can be in the office of the Prime Minister and we can and do also have people who are on the ground working and drinking tea with local people to win their trust and introduce these new ideas.

WWF Supporter 6: Would the funding be paid directly to the local authorities?

Eric Dinerstein: That's a good question. We've set up a system already in place for a community forest rework where the money goes to these councils that are set up and democratically elected, and where there is a clear decision-making process for how the money that's generated gets spent.
In this way, you avoid the situation that you've probably heard of in other projects where one person, often the village head man, takes the money and runs off with the capital and buys a new Land Rover or something even more incredulous and spends the money unwisely for the 'benefit of the community.' What we're doing now is-or what we have been doing over the last 15 years-is putting the money into a fund which the village committee can access when they submit proposals of how they would spend it, and they're competitive so that the best proposals win the resources.

WWF Supporter 6: I find this interesting. I'm sure you're probably aware that this tactic of preserving the tiger prey is going to run you into some trouble with those who are animal rights supporters who are totally against stall feeding. Many people, I think an increasing number, are supporting organic, natural, agricultural practices and having the wildlife be able to roam free and eat the grasses and things like that. So it's very interesting to kind of manage those what now seem to be competing goals because they are all environmentally related.

Eric Dinerstein: That's an interesting perspective. I hadn't thought of that, although I would bet that if a lot of the animal rights people took a good look at the free-ranging herds of domestic livestock and the conditions therein, they'd probably vote for stall feeding in a heartbeat because if you look at some of these herds, they're often quite sickly; they don't really have enough weight on them. They don't produce any milk and of course, in the Hindu part of the tiger's range they don't eat them [cows], but in other parts, they do slaughter the livestock. And even there, the ones that are kept for human consumption if they're free-ranging are typically not in as good condition as the ones that are stall fed. It's been a long tradition of just allowing animals to graze freely across the landscape, and stall feeding is relatively a recent phenomena or one that only the rich people could afford. We're trying to make it beneficial for everybody. I suppose you could also make the argument that by not offering poor villagers a chance to stall feed cattle and only allowing those who have money to do it, then it's just sort of helping to cement some of the inequities in that society in a small way.

WWF Supporter 2: I was just wondering, when you talk about the size of the herds or the number of cattle owned by these villages, what numbers are you talking in? That might put it in perspective.

Eric Dinerstein: Well, it really depends, and mostly, we're talking about the subcontinent where you have this long tradition of pastoralism because in Indochina or the countries of Southeast Asia, there aren't the large herds that you see in India and Nepal, Southern Bhutan and other areas. The average number for a small village can be 100 or more, 150-200 free-ranging cattle per village typically; most people who have stall-fed animals don't have more than two. Typically what they do is if they want to go to stall feeding, they'll sell off their cattle and use those resources and buy two, a male and a female of the hybrids that can be stall fed, that gain weight much more quickly, produce much more milk, are much healthier. If they use them for oxen, they're much stronger; they can help plow their fields, so they already know which ones are valuable. They basically just graze their domestic stock, simply as part of their culture, and the idea is if they get any bit of milk from them, then that's fine, but they don't really expect anything from them, which is more part of a tradition that's held over. So it's one though that might have been possibly easier to accommodate when there were fewer people living in those areas and fewer cattle, but now with populations the way they are, it's become a very destructive practice.

WWF Supporter 5: Eric, as I recall, Dylan Ripley created this tiger project back in the 1970's and if nothing had been done from a conservation angle, what would the status of the tiger be today?

Eric Dinerstein: That's a good question. I think that that project was a major turning point for tiger conservation, and it's interesting that we were at the National Zoo yesterday and we had this launch. Somebody who has become really the head of all tiger biologists, is John Seidensticker, who was involved under the project that Dylan Ripley started. He's still at it. More white hairs and more scars from interactions with other tiger biologists, but still leading us. And it's so important to think about how much we learned by being granted the opportunity to study tigers in the way that we did in Nepal-not just in terms of tigers, but in so many ways how Nepal has really led the way of innovative ways to conserve wildlife in Asia. I like to think that that wouldn't have happened without Ripley's timely intervention there, and how his mentoring of a lot of people who have been involved with WWF for a long time and so many others really changed the course of tiger conservation. I'd put it this way: I shudder to think about where we'd be now without that having happened because I don't think that tigers would have been radio collared and studied. And our techniques have developed so much, but that was the first country that took the gamble and trusted Westerners enough to let them come in and try to help them conserve the tigers of that country. And it's paid enormous dividends, that we still owe a debt to today I suppose.

Tom Lalley: This study is appreciably different than the study done 10 years ago. What is the difference between the two? As I understand it, it's not so much open source, but there is a way for this to be a living document that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Eric Dinerstein: That's right. While we think that the study 10 years ago was what I think was a breakthrough, it was because for the first time it mapped the distribution of tigers across their range. In fact, when John Seidensticker first saw the maps that we created, he said that he had a religious experience because for the first time he saw an accurate portrayal of where we thought tigers lived or could live. But the reality was that the data that we were using then wasn't as recent as it could have been, and it was all based on habitat assessment. This time around-and what we did 10 years ago-was point out a lot of the places where we just didn't know enough to say anything about tigers. So we marked these as survey areas. In the last decade, we've gone out to a lot of those and intensively surveyed them so we have much better information. In fact, we had over 3,000 points of tiger occurrences to build into our analysis. We also have the benefit that we now live in satellite age or the Google Earth age. I don't know what the next stage is going to be, but we have incredible details of satellite imagery at high resolution that we put together to basically improve our land cover maps of the tiger range. And we know so much more about tiger behavior and tiger dispersal, so we know what fragments are out there. Fragments of habitat are too distant from a neighboring fragment for tigers to cross and move into, nor are they big enough to support a breeding tiger. We know that it takes, for example, two deer per week to fuel a breeding female tiger, so we have much better information now of how much wildlife we need to have out there to support one.

So all of that together made this a much more accurate document, but what's even better is that we've created a sort of methodology that is transparent and can be easily rerun and updated with new information that can be put into a database that's now on line. The big problem before with our previous document is that it wasn't repeatable-it was based on expert opinions of the assessment of tigers in a number of areas; this time, it's replaced by hard data that can be investigated, challenged and updated by biologists who are working in those areas. So it's a vast improvement. Having said that though-and maybe this should be a closing statement-even though this might be heretical to say as a scientist, the more biological information we get on tigers we think is only going to maybe incrementally advance our understanding of what it takes to save tigers now. We know that pretty well, so what we're really hoping for is not that we want to cease research at all-obviously we want to continue with it-but we've got to make a much greater effort on the policy side of how to save these magnificent creatures.

Some of the things that we've really recommended in our 'user's guide' to conserve any recovery of wild tigers is, aside from the Tiger Summit, a series of steps that we strongly advocate, and that includes recruiting global and regional spokespeople of great stature to speak out for tiger conservation. And maybe we can somehow entice Tiger Woods to become our spokesman, or certainly Jackie Chan and other film celebrities from the tiger range states are ready to help with this. The idea is that because tigers occur in over 13 countries to get key spokespeople in all those countries to speak up and be part of this network to help promote tiger conservation.

Another important, maybe a little bit more 'behind the scenes' effort, is to really try to get what we call 'mainstream tiger conservation' into these national and regional development plans so that, similar to what I outlined in Nepal, we make this the norm instead of the exception in that tiger conservation fits into any sort of major new decisions about land use in those countries. We need to make this document as broadly acceptable as possible, and for people to become familiar with it so that they can act on these recommendations. Obviously we have to reduce the illegal trade in tiger parts because if we can help reduce that side of the equation, it's going to make our work in conserving tigers in the world much easier. We also need to get much better at issuing what we call 'public report cards' on the status of the 76 tiger conservation landscapes that we identified so that those that are not performing very well and in which conservation is not succeeding can be examined and it can be addressed pretty quickly.

I think another major threat for World Wildlife Fund in the next few years is going to be how we better link ecosystem services-or what we call the 'natural capital'-that habitats provide; how we can be able to connect and overlap places that are important for conserving these natural resources and the services that are beneficial to humanity that we get free of charge in places where tigers occur or can be restored. We need to get the double benefit of bundling them together if you will, the ecosystem services with a bio-diversity conservation outcome. And I think that if we do all of those things that we're going to be far more successful than we have been in the previous 10 years, but the point that we come back to is that another decade like the last one will be catastrophic for tigers. I think that it could behoove all of us-from WWF members to the scientists in my programs who are in the field-to do everything that we can to make this Tiger Summit a reality, and to push for as much publicity as we can for the news from this study, and start instigating new activities to really have tigers rebound.

Tom Lalley: We'll have to leave it at that. We're out of time, but before we go, I want to let you know how you can get a hold of some information about this study. First off, we're quite happy to send you a copy of the user's guide. It's a fantastic document and I'll let you know how to get that in just a moment, but the easiest way to get information is to go to www.tigermap.org. That's tigermap.org, the website where there is a ton of information on this study.

I want to thank everyone for joining us, and if you do have further questions or want a copy of the study, please email lauren.thompson@wwfus.org, or call her at 202-778-9750. Thanks again and we do hope that you join us for another one of these calls; we'll let you know by e-mail when they occur. Thanks again for joining us and thank you very much for your support of World Wildlife Fund.