Tigers About The House – Conserving the Corporation

Last night, I tuned in to watch Tigers About The House on the BBC. It was aptly filling the suddenly void Springwatch slot and who doesn’t want to see cute tumbling tiger tots on the telly. Well, me actually. It took about ten minutes before I started to feel anxious and annoyed, but once it set in it stayed with me throughout the entire programme.

Set in Australia Zoo, the park pretty much put on the map by Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, my heart sank a little pretty much straight away. I’m not anti-zoo, but the recently formed coalition between Australia Zoo, Bindi Irwin and SeaWorld disturbs me greatly. After all, Australia Zoo, home of the Crocoseum and daily shows, already walks a fine line between zoo and circus. They say it’s where their wildlife warriors take on conservation issues, but actually it’s no more than a reptile-themed lion tamer’s act, with the animals being coerced with food into lunging and rearing aggressively in order to be fed.

The Tiger Temple features a splash pool for the tigers and numerous toys are provided. I’m pretty confident that welfare isn’t an issue at Australia Zoo. Keepers are often very passionate and strongly attached to their animals, especially when they can be hands on as is the case here. But the splash pool is a viewing station where you can watch swimming tigers and the toys provide ample photo opportunities for the tourists. Let’s not kid ourselves that any large corporate zoo is set up with animal welfare and conservation in mind. They need to make money just like any other normal business and corporation. Their money is wrapped up in their livestock and it needs to be pleasingly presented and available 24/7 in order to make the most money. As London Zoo are currently discovering, tiger cubs are major revenue drivers. You couldn’t swing a cat in Camden at the moment without bumping into an oversized tiger banner!

When they say Sumatran tigers are critically endangered and that conservation is a key issue, they are completely correct. And when they say that the vast majority of Sumatran tigers in captivity are closely related having come from the same gene bank of approximately 14 individuals, they are also correct. But breeding from a tigress not from this gene bank although preferable, has nothing to do with conservation. No tiger cub born in captivity will ever see the wild. The only population being made more genetically diverse and increasing in number is the captive one. All Australia Zoo and any other zoo breeding tigers are doing is protecting their investment. They are conserving their ability to make money in the future, certainly not a species that numbers less than 400 in the wild.

Australia Zoo is involved in conservation projects, with anti-poaching patrols, equipment and vehicle provisions, which are all certainly admirable. But they are aiding already existing organisations and projects and there is a huge difference between supporting something and spear heading a movement. We won’t be seeing new reserves, habitat or release schemes being endorsed by Australia Zoo or a similar corporation any time soon. The more endangered, difficult to see and less tactile the wild animal is, the more precious the captive one becomes. But not in the way you think. It may, one day soon, get to the point where the only place you will see a tiger is in zoo. And to these corporations, that will be a major bonus.

It would also be pretty impossible not to be involved in conservation in some way. When your marketing team are falling over themselves to make the most of even the tiniest PR opportunity whilst your tigers are still cute, fluffy money magnets, you have to at least look like you’re doing something for the greater good. But whose is the greater good in the end? And of course, there are such lovely enticing tax breaks for charitable corporations.

So finally, onto the programme itself and the bit where they separate the cubs from the mother for their own wellbeing. This is where everything fell apart for me. I’d swallowed the corporate conservation codswallop until then, but this was nothing but nonsense. The cubs were perfectly healthy, mum was attentive and happy. But there is only limited PR opportunity in tigers raising tigers. A tiger in the house, raised by a keeper? Could you imagine?! Mrs Keeper is worried about what might get damaged whilst Mr Keeper is worried about getting a good night’s sleep and Kiddie Keeper just wants to cuddle a cub. I mean, there’s at least a TV series in that, not to mention press and PR that would make any marketing department giddy.

We were told that mum was happy with the arrangement, but let’s not forget that we only have a five second sound bite and the work of the editor (who I’m guessing wasn’t from the BBC natural history unit) to go on. What we now know about big cats and their complex emotive states, all relatively recent research, is that they are similar to elephants, apes and cetaceans in their neurological makeup. This is just a bad idea all round and I doubt very much that mum was indeed fine with the arrangement. Nor were the cubs, who took to formula like a turkey takes to Christmas. Then they suffered upset stomachs. This could have been the formula (no reason or what the illness could be is ever mentioned), but the house itself presents an environment where perhaps genetically vulnerable wild animals might not exactly prosper. Cue the arrival of the two dogs they share the house with and goodness knows what man-made chemicals, food stuffs, etc. Is now a good time to mention that the critically endangered Amur tiger and leopard are being threatened by a number of species-jumping canine carried viruses? Don’t believe for one second any of this is being done with the cubs’ welfare in mind.

And ask any midwife about the precious antibody building components of mother’s milk. It’s a fair question to ask if they would have gotten ill if they’d been snuggled up with mum, and many hundreds seemed to be asking just that on Twitter last night. I’m guessing the programme possibly isn’t going down as well as the BBC hoped. For me, this is encouraging, and possibly marks a change in people’s perspective and attitude to how we see animals in captivity. Of course though, there is a corporation that claims serious conservation credentials and also separates mothers and offspring as they see fit, good old SeaWorld. It would seem Australia Zoo is keen to learn old tricks from its new relationship.

There are plenty of organisations that are knee deep in the hands-on conservation of big cats and I have listed the best below. Sumatran tigers need to be protected, bred and raised in the wild. This is where conservation needs to be focused. We need to protect their habitat, prosecute poachers and fight the Chinese medicine trade. Going to the zoo won’t do any of that.

http://www.panthera.org/

The Real Tigers

A short story in celebration of World Wildlife Day

This was madness and the horrid twist in my gut was telling me it would soon escalate to bloody madness. Raaka, the elephant I was riding with the Mahout Bhavin seemed to share my concerns as she rumbled a warning and flapped her ears forward, a clear sign she was uncomfortable.

Earlier in the day, I had found the paw prints of a tigress with at least two cubs in tow. As we had followed her trail through the thinning trees, the soft yowling ‘bharuu’ calls, tiger talk for “I’m here, where are you?” had given her away on the outskirts of the park. As we had crossed from the Kaziranga border into the fields beyond, the forest rangers had suddenly become incredibly agitated, jabbering at each other and shouting excitedly as they drove the elephants forward into the tall grass and cane. In the far distance I could see the beautiful and striking magenta pink, marigold orange and kingfisher greens of the women’s dresses, intermingled with the dark khaki of the army soldiers and the cornflower blue of the police. The noise of banging pots and pans and what I hoped were just fire crackers popping drifted over the fields towards us.

This after all, was what I was meant to be here to stop. Kaziranga had become famous in the last few years in conservation circles for being the prime example of how not to do it. The national park represented the largest concentration of tigers anywhere in the world, something of which the Indian government were very proud. The reality though, was that the park was far too small to house the growing number of tigers and certainly couldn’t sustain the additional animals being dumped here on a regular basis through a poorly conceived relocation programme.

When tigers got close to villages, left the park borders or attacked livestock as this tigress was suspected of doing, the forest rangers would organise these ridiculous, anarchic, Raj-like drives. Tigers were driven into a bottle neck between the park and local villages where they supposedly would then be easier to tranquilise and remove. Unfortunately the tigers rarely co-operated and more worryingly, the forest rangers were not great shots. All too often, scared and cornered tigers turned on the approaching elephants and rangers. When this happened, the tiger instantly became a ‘problem animal’ and all thoughts of simply subduing it evaporated. The result was often a mauled ranger and a dead tiger. Just this morning we had shown the rangers videos of tigers attacking elephant riders, but apparently to no avail.

Raaka decided now was as good a time as any to satisfy her sweet tooth and ripped a clump of cane from the ground. I went to tap Bhavin on the shoulder to remind him this wasn’t a good idea when I noticed the silence. The elephants had all stopped and were rolling back and forth on their feet. I could see Chahna ahead swishing her head back and forth, tusks low to the ground. They were instinctively clumping together. Then it came, the deafening roar. It started and ended with spitted snarls. A flame of orange had appeared just ahead of Chahna and then it came at us like a forest fire, dancing over the ground in maddened hops of rage. Manish, Chahna’s Mahout fired the tranquiliser rifle. The tigress only hesitated for a second before she bellowed in utter outrage, then she was flying. I was still recovering from being hit in the chest by the roar itself as I watched the tigress’s paw swipe at Manish and make contact as she barreled over Chahna’s side and disappeared again into the grass, this time back towards the forest. Gun’s blazed, panicked cries echoed and Manish was sitting on the ground, holding his mangled hand high above him to stop the blood flow.

We calmed the elephants as best we could. Manish was put back on Chahna with another Mahout and sent off towards the village. But now Samir and I had to persuade our Mahouts to help us find a rather upset tigress. Raaka rumbled her own concerns again as we moved off towards the forest. We didn’t have to go far. Sprawled over the roots of a semal tree on the edge of the forest lay our tigress. Samir was already on the radio, but I was watching the clump of elephant grass that was shaking uncontrollably behind her. A bobbing head holding two piercing amber eyes appeared, and then another. I smiled. The tigress had been my first tiger, her fury and power had been raw, uncontrollable and intensely frightening. I knew how the forest guards and villagers felt. But these cubs were precious, quiet and meek shadows of the wild that needed protection. These were the real tigers and how we needed to make India and the rest of the world see them.