Chthonic Wildlife Ramblings

The Bangkok Post reported on the rescue of a malayan tiger, caught in a trap- Malaysian officials save endangered Malayan tiger. Quotes below are from the article.

Malaysian wildlife authorities rescued a five-year old Malayan tiger, badly injured in a snare set up by poachers near the country's jungle border with Thailand, officials said Monday. ...

"We received a tip-off on Saturday and a joint patrol with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature-Malaysia's wildlife protection unit found the injured animal," northern Perak state wildlife and National Parks director Sabrina Shariff told AFP.

The Malayan tiger was only recognised as a separate subspecies to the Indo-Chinese tiger in 2004. It's range includes southern Thailand as well as Malaysia.

"We face a major problem from Thai and Malaysian poachers who set up numerous snares in the Belum-Temengor forest reserve area between the two countries, with such traps normally located close to roads as the animals are attracted by sound and food smells."

This reinforces a point that is often over-looked in wildlife poaching. The people that actually poach wildlife are typically locals. They are often drawn from hunting cultures, and in many parts of Asia, have less than amicable relations with the authorities. Poachers aren't foreign criminals ranging through forests trying to kill tigers.

The smuggling conspiracies for tiger parts depend heavily on these local experts to kill tigers for them. Without the cooperation of local communities amongst- or adjacent to- tiger populations, there would be very little poaching.

Sabrina said authorities were also concerned that poachers were targeting other wildlife in the area including Bucking deers, whose footprints were found around other snares near the tiger.

Again, this point was made in my paper in Global Crime on the black market for tiger parts. Tigers typically make up a minority of the species that are poached. Indeed, it's often more true to say that most poachers are leopard poachers who occasionally take tigers.

"This incident clearly demonstrates the need for a stronger enforcement presence in the Belum-Temengor area," WWF-Malaysia chief Dionysius Sharma said in a statement.

"If this isn't enough of a clarion call for the government to afford more resources to form an anti-poaching Task Force, I don't know what is," he added.

Unfortunately enforcement is not proving to be a very efficient way to reduce tiger poaching. The problem is that tigers are secretive animals that live in low densities, in a mosaic of habitats. Poachers have a lot of strategies to beat enforcement agencies.

Malaysia doesn't actually have a good track record of catching poachers (none in the roughly decade-long sample period I looked at). That's probably not assisted by the close proximity of the Thai border.

The government said in July it had sought the help of the military to battle poaching, adding that Malaysia was committed to an ambitious plan to double the tiger population to 1,000 by 2020.

This is part of the IUCN global plan to save the tiger. So far we're not making a lot of progress.

I note that the NZ Herald and some other newspapers that have picked up this story, mention the demand for tiger parts in traditional medicines. This is only partly correct. The market for skins (which are not used for medicine) is also large and in some parts of Asia, far more important than the medicine markets.

Wildlife poaching is a pretty serious threat to a lot of species. In theory, it's one of those issues where the solution seems so clear, but implementing that solution is actually very, very hard.

We do though, seem to have a much better understanding of how to encourage and sustain poachers. Afterall, tigers in large parts of Asia are on the brink of extinction. Recent reports from Africa indicate that elephants are being poached at a greater rate than the horrors of the 1980s.

There are I think, two main proximate causes of these very conspicuous policy failures. First, we tend to treat poaching- because it is a wildlife problem- as a problem that biologists are trained to fix. But with all deference to my zoology colleagues, they don't do courses in black-market economics and law enforcement. I wouldn't trust many of my economist colleagues to undertake an ecological survey either. So there tends to be a lot of noise and talk, and policies that attack the symptoms of the trade get implemented. There's not a lot of direct action to combat the main drivers of poaching.

The second, is that poachers and smugglers are assumed to be idiots. In other words, all you have to is bust one conspiracy or monitor one route into a country, and the smugglers will give up. They won't figure out how to get around these enforcement measures. This leads to a lot of anti-poaching policy being more of the same. Repeat the same measures over and over in increasing intensity, and hope that this will fix the problem. Alas, ivory poachers have abandoned the legal supply routes in favour of routes using shipping containers, mislabeled as machine-parts or the like. It really doesn't matter anymore how hard we squeeze the legal trade (irregular shipments from Southern Africa). The smuggler's don't care because they aren't using that route.

So, how have we managed to inflate the levels of poaching for tigers and elephants so high again?


What we have learned in the wildlife smuggling business, is that trade bans in wildlife products only give you a short-term payoff. When you ban trade in certain wildlife products, then you get a drop in poaching because all the causal and small scale operations collapse. They don't have the resources or expertise to get around the law enforcement measures. And if you're really lucky, demand for the wildlife products will collapse. This collapse in demand doesn't happen a lot.

So, poaching dips down after the ban. Demand in importing countries remains high though, so the black-market price starts to rise. This lures in new smuggling firms. These are criminal firms that have the resources, have the expertise and ability to get around the law enforcement agencies. In other words, you replace casual and small scale poachers with big, organised criminal conspiracies.

That I'm afraid, then makes the problem a lot worse. Organised criminal firms are harder to stop than small-scale firms. The lesson really is that a trade ban in wildlife products has a short-shelf life. It buys you time to implement better management systems. In Africa, the CITES ban in 1989 was accompanied by a period of 4 years of increased enforcement. This trickled away as Western donors curbed funding. As Asian stockpiles of ivory ran down, prices soared again and poaching accelerated.

Similarly with tigers, the trade bans in tiger-parts has lead to sky-rocketing black-market prices and the involvement of resourceful and clever criminal conspiracies. We're effectively trying to save tigers by putting a bounty of US$50k on every wild tiger in Asia. So far that doesn't seem to be working.

What we tend to get however, is the assumption because the ban did reduce poaching once, perpetuating the ban will someday, somehow, deliver the same reduction again.

Well in all the highs and lows of the IUCN and the World Bank trying to set up the Global Tiger Workshop in Nepal, I might still be going.

After the IUCN pulled the plug on collaboration I was out. China was vacillating about going. I think that they may have resolved to attend now.

That means I might still be able to make it, as the Chinese are a bit keener than the World Bank to have tiger poaching experts at these events.

Complicating issues however is that I will have to fly direct from a swamp near Darwin direct to Nepal. That means no chance to return home for a breather first.

A couple of years ago, I was at one of these Tiger meetings when Indian reserves were brought up.

At that point in time, India had lost all the tigers from one of its reserves as poachers sweeped through. Nonetheless, because other reserves had not been touched, there was an air of confidence. Other reserves were being better managed and were obviously keeping poachers at bay. This is all part of the over-whelming belief that poaching can be solved by "enough" law enforcement.

I operate on the theory that poachers are not stupid. They have a large number of strategies available to evade detection, and have been using them for years.

My own thoughts at this junction, were that the survival of tigers in other reserves, had more to do with the poachers just not having 'got there'. And it had less to do with the effectiveness of management in these areas.

Now India is reporting that one more reserve (Panna) has lost all its tigers ecoworld link and that another reserve may similarly have lost all its tigers.

The global plan to double wild tiger numbers by 2020 is off to a very shaky start.

It is somewhat illuminating that when I started investigating tiger poaching about 2 years ago, there were supposed to be 4000 tigers in India. Within 12 months, we were down to 4000 tigers in all of Asia. But note that in a lot of countries, we still don't know how many tigers are left in some coountries (the Sumatran population is pretty much guess-work).

In India, 30 tiger deaths have already been reported this year (note that not all tiger deaths get reported, so this is actually quite concerning.

The Hindu Times reports on some of these deaths. In the Kanha reserve, 7 tigers have been lost (one to poachers, 6 to fights amonsgt the tigers).

Other deaths have been attributed to poisoning by locals.