CLIVE GAMMON
If you happen to be a tiger, there's only one place to head for: Nepal. There,-the protec- tive hand of King Mahendra II has been placed over Panthera tigris tigris, and deep trouble awaits any hunter who tries to ex- tend his operations from the Indian sub- continent into such noted tiger hideaways as the Terai Forest.
It was not always thus, however. As recently as three years ago the King himself was an enthusiastic slayer of tigers with (not surprisingly, considering his advantages) perhaps the highest rate of scoring in the world to his credit. But three years ago, while crouching in his tnachan, or hide, he suffered a heart attack so severe that he was compelled to lie where he was until a specialist could be flown out from the UK. No more tiger shikars for King Mahendra after that, but he adapted very swiftly to the changed situation. From being the world's top tiger shot he became the world's top conservationist of the species, ramming this point home, it is said, by immediately having two tiger poachers executed. 'A nice little man,' was how an official of the World Wildlife Fund described him to me—but of course he was prejudiced.
It is far tougher for tigers in India and Pakistan, where the species is now said to be reduced almost to extermination point. There were roughly 40,000 Bengal tigers in 1930. Now, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature says there .are not many more than 2,000. At that, the Bengal sub-species is much stronger than any of the other six. The Caspian tiger now num- bers about fifty animals, mostly in Iran and Afghanistan. The Siberian tiger (Soviet Far East and Korea) is down to 120 or so. Pos- sibly a dozen Javan tigers and an unknown (but tiny) number of Sumatran tigers remain. The Bali tiger is presumed extinct; and a recent report by a Chinese zoologist on the mammals of Yunnan and Szechwan prov- inces, formerly the stronghold of the Chinese
tiger (apart from paper ones) just doesn't mention the species.
Oddly (and this is not special pleading), traditional tiger hunting is not to blame for the catastrophic decline. The tiger was numerically strongest in the days of the Raj, when the great princely shikars were at their
height. Hundreds of elephants, thousands of beaters penned tigers into the ring for slaughter, and in 1966 one aged maharajah claimed to have killed 1,300 in his lifetime. Not less noteworthy, over a shorter span, was the achievement of King-Emperor George v who in the space of eleven days in 1912 saw off thirty-nine tigers.
But the royal hunts were not frequent, and the tiger population of India actually rose between 1907 and 1934. Even shooting, British style, from a machan was a costly and elaborate pursuit.
Killing tigers is much easier now. Al- though the tiger is said to be a protected beast in India, there are still twenty-seven agencies offering tiger hunting to tourists at around £900—cheaper than a lion safari in Africa. The shooting, too, is something that would have shocked the old hunters: it is carried on at night from spotlight-equipped jeeps.
The real slaughter of the Bengal tiger, though, is by poison. Foreign aid has poured huge quantities of dieldrin, aldrin and DOT into India for agricultural use, and peasant farmers soon learned that cow carcasses spread with these substances were deadly tiger bait. The tigers die in agony two to three weeks after eating them and so do the jackals, vultures and leopards which shared the feast. Professional tiger poachers who are interested in the skins alone (these fetch £60 to £70 each) also use poison.
Tigers are also shorter of their natural food than they ever have been. In postwar India and Pakistan, millions of acres of jungle swamp land and prairie have disap- peared, and with them the various species of deer which once inhabited the ground now devoted to commercial crops, new towns and new roads. Even nature reserves like the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been flooded for hydroelectric schemes.
A tiger needs about 15 lbs of fresh meat each day to survive and if it cannot find game it turns to domestic cattle or man. Then, naturally, a local official can declare it outside the conservation law and so it goes on the shikar list.
A small and naturally unnoticed by-prod- uct of the dreadful Pakistan floods this year was the probable wipe-out of a good propor-
tion of the remaining Pakistani tigers which had established a last redoubt in islands in the stricken delta areas. Plans had been made to establish a reserve for them here, It looks, therefore, as if the enterprise and (if one may be forgiven for saying so) change of heart of King Mahendra is about the only thing the tiger has running in its favotir at the moment.
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