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Far East Economy Review - Save China's Tigers

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Far East Economy Review article

 

Out of Africa, Into Uncertainty

 

Issue cover-dated September 04, 2003

 

THINGS WEREN'T GOING WELL for Tom Dahmer. Yesterday's unexpected

snowstorm had left him with numb toes. Today's sudden thaw had turned

his camp site into a mud pit.

 

Worse still, Dahmer couldn't find any tigers. For two years, the

40-year-old American biologist had been travelling across China on a

government-funded census of the wild South China tiger population. Now,

in March 2003, he was in Hunan province at the Huapingshan Reserve, a

land-that-time-forgot place where hills of evergreen forests rise above

a river canyon. It wouldn't be a bad place to live if you were a tiger.

 

But after five provinces, countless interviews with locals and reviews

of

more than 4,000 photographs from 500 infrared, motion-detecting " trap

cameras, " Dahmer was about ready to admit defeat. " Tigers kill things, "

he says. " They shit every now and then. They scratch trees. Where's the

skeletons of scarfed-up goats, scat or pug marks? There's nothing

complicated about this; the truth is there's damn near none left. "

 

Don't tell that to Li Quan. Born in 1962, the Year of the Tiger, she's

been mad about cats since she was a little girl. Now she's driving an

ambitious, some say foolhardy, plan backed by the Chinese government to

save Panthera tigris amoyensis--the South China tiger. Here's how it

goes:

On September 1, two South China tiger cubs bred in captivity at Suzhou

Zoo will be shipped off to live in a park in South Africa, where, it's

hoped, they will learn to hunt and survive in the wild. Over the next

four years, they will be followed by another three to eight cubs. Then,

in about five years' time, cubs that have been successfully " rewilded "

will be reintroduced to China as young adults, where they'll go to live

in an as yet unidentified pilot reserve.

 

Li believes that eco-tourism will make the planned reserve economically

sustainable. And the resettled tigers might also breed with wild tigers

(if there are any left), adding much-needed genetic diversity to the

species.

For Li, dressed in a Chlo?T-shirt adorned with a tiger, the project is

something she must do: " I would feel personally responsible if I did not

try to make a small contribution to its survival. " But what Li and the

Chinese authorities regard as lateral thinking, many in the

international scientific community see as dangerous nonsense.

 

Naturalists argue that reintroduction should be done in the animals'

natural environment--for South China tigers, that's China, not Africa.

Their catalogue of reasons is depressing: They warn of unforeseen

ecologiccal effects and unnecessary risks inherent in shipping the

tigers to Africa--everything from transport hazards to transmittable

diseases.

And even if the cubs do survive the trip to Africa, naturalists warn

that their reintroduction into the wild in China might do little good.

The cubs, along with China's 60-or-so other captive tigers, are all the

offspring of just six or eight original tigers, so they're highly

inbred--birth rates are low, mortality rates are high. In fact, some in

the conservation community have already issued a " death certtificate "

for the South China tiger, and argue that limited conservation funds

should be spent on tiger sub-species with a viable wild population, like

the Bengal tiger.

" I can't think of anybody in the world of conservation who would tell

you this is a good idea, " says Judy Mills from the United States-based

Conservation International, who has focused on saving tigers for nearly

20 years. " This is not science. It's not conservation. It could be a

major biological disaster for Africa. "

Some days, you just can't save an endangered species.

 

If you were looking for wild tigers in China, you could do worse than

visit the Meihuashan South China Tiger Breeding and Research Centre in

Fujian province. The journey here goes via Longyan City, from where a

river leads into the highlands. The urban sprawl soon dies out but the

river is lined with coal and concrete factories that fill the sky with

an acrid black smoke. Ascending Meihuashan (Plum Blossom Mountain), the

air finally becomes crisp and clear, the forest primal. Rumour has it a

three-legged tiger still stalks the forests around here; apparently it

tore off its own leg to escape from a trap placed by a local hunter in

1983.

 

As late as 1959 there were an estimated 4,000 South China tigers in

China, keeping alive a link with a creature long revered in Chinese

folklore (up to three other tiger subspecies, the Siberian, Indochinese

and--possibly--the Bengal, are also found in China). But then Mao Zedong

started penning slogans like " Man Must Conquer Nature " aand declared

tigers and other predators vermin, leading to them being mercilessly

hunted. Add in habitat destruction from the relentless tide of

human-population expansion and illegal poaching, and the tiger's fate

was sealed. It's now been at least 20 years since the last reliably

confirmed sighting in the wild of a South China tiger (there have been

plenty of unconfirmed reports). These days, even the most optimistic

estimates put the wild population at no more than 30.

 

Which is why Li decided to act. As a top executive at Gucci, her

knowledge of fur was as fashion until an epiphany struck on a holiday in

South Africa in 1999: Why not apply the eco-tourism model in China to

help save the tiger? That same year she formed Save China's Tigers and,

moving quickly, signed the tiger-exchange deal with Beijing in November

2002. For this graduate of the Beijing University and Wharton School of

Business, the scheme made good sense: South Africa would gain marketing

mileage and tourist income from her high-profile campaign, while Beijing

would learn how to use eco-tourism to boost the rural economy. But Li

hadn't reckoned on the reaction of conservationists. " I was quite

na & #26183;e

in underestimating the opposing forces, " she confides.

 

Mills of Conservation International, for instance, damns the project as

" a circus sideshow dressed up as eco-tourism. The only good I can

possibly see is someone makes money and a wealthy dilettante feels as if

she has done something. Conservation should be left to conservationists.

This woman would be better off giving her money to those who know what

to do with it. "

Others are equally scathing. Chris Furley, veterinary director of

Howletts Wild Animal Park in England, is a leading authority on wildlife

reintroduction, with 15 years of experience overseeing release projects

in Africa, such as returning captive lowland gorillas to the wild in the

Congo. He was initially interested in Li's project, but changed his mind

after flying to Beijing. " The whole thing is ridiculous, " he says. " It

doesn't make biological sense. Our strong feeling is it should be done

in-situ. "

 

Doubts over the project's scientific basis have also been raised by

Ronald Tilson, renowned tiger researcher and conservation director of

the Minnesota Zoo in the U.S., who originally oversaw the

government-backed census study of the tigers. After just eight months he

concluded that the tiger no longer exists in the wild. " Nobody was more

disappointed than I, " he says. Beijing shelved his report. " How I hate

scientists, " Li says.

Li has faced other obstacles, too. There was a very public falling out

with the two South African brothers who had signed up to run the South

African sanctuary. Dave and John Varty " pioneered the conservation

development model using eco-tourism, " according to Dave, and now run a

veritable chain of upmarket wildlife lodges in Africa as well as a

film-production company. Their interest in self-promotion (they had

signed a deal with the Discovery Channel for a movie on the South China

tigers) has led some to compare them to Las Vegas lion-tamers Siegfried

and Roy. But in their defence, the Vartys point to their practical

knowledge gained from 30 years of experience in rehabilitating lions,

leopards, cheetahs and even two Bengal tigers to the wild. The brothers

and Li are now battling things out in the South African courts, with Li

accusing them of misusing funds and the Vartys accusing Li of defamation

and intimidation. (Li has since secured a new partner, South Africa's

National Zoo.)

 

Despite the difficulties and opposition, Li has refused to be knocked

off course. She's a formidable opponent. She speaks seven languages, and

is clearly intelligent, sometimes arrogant; she has cultivated

connections with the Chinese government, in part through her family's

links with the People's Liberation Army. She also has money: Her

husband, Stuart Bray, is a multi-millionaire, who's coughed up more than

$4 million for the tigers to date.

 

Both she and the Chinese government say there's no alternative to their

project. Bray puts the choice in stark terms: " If we wait until the

Chinese habitat is ready, some scientists predict the tigers will be

extinct before the land is ready. "

 

Wang Weisheng, director of the China Wildlife Research Centre, is the

government spearhead. He asserts that in the world's most populous

nation there's simply no room to rehabilitate an animal requiring a

range of 20 square miles without first resettling people. By preparing

tigers to live in the wild in South Africa, people won't need to be

uprooted until at least 2008, by which time a model for eco-tourism will

be in place.

" This way we can resettle and find people jobs quickly, " explains Wang,

who says the pilot reserve could become China's first-ever national

wildlife park. And even if the tiger project does fail--Chris Furley

puts the odds at no better than 50-50--land will still be returned to a

pristine state. Wang, though, is expectting much more than just that:

" We'll provide a good model for wildlife protection and economic

development, " he says.

Perhaps, but for successful reintroduction to take place, the nation

must first cultivate a sense of environmental stewardship, which means

preserving not only the tiger, but also the creatures it preys on--the

antelope-like serow, wild boar and various species of deer--many of

which are themselves endangered. According to Tom Daahmer, those

creatures all showed up only rarely on trap-camera photographs during

the tiger census. During that study, a porter at a wildlife reserve in

Jiangxi snatched up a snake and stowed it in a shirt for later

consumption, right in front of a forestry official. Even Stuart Bray

recalls touring a swath of woods in another reserve with government

officials when a rabbit hopped in their path and was swiftly caught by

one of the reserve's staff employees with his bare hands. " Didn't take

much to figure out he'd done that before, " laughs Bray.

 

Back at the Meihuashan reserve, the six resident tigers are out playing

in their hillside enclosure, their brilliant striped coats flashing a

sunset orange over taut, rippling muscles: a glorious harmony of beauty

and danger.

A procession of school buses arrives at the park, disgorging children

who scream in terror and delight every time a tiger roars. Maybe this is

the hope for the future of wildlife conservation in China: They're

pint-sized, wearing 101 Dalmatians backpacks, sipping soda through

straws. But without tigers, kids will have a lot less to cheer about.

And the world will have lost a voice.

 

**

 

FADING INTO HISTORY

A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 wild tigers in Asia.

Today, there are no more than 7,000. Three of the region's eight tiger

subspecies--the Caspian, Javan and Bali tigers--are now presumed to be

extinct. Some naturalists believe a fourth, the South China tigerr, is

extinct in the wild, though around 50 remain in captivity.

 

 

Kate Reynolds

-SAVE CHINA'S TIGERS-

www.savechinastigers.org

kate.reynolds

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