Tigers Transcript

Continuation of the Tiger Conferance Call on July 21, 2006

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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.