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.

The recent killing of a Sumatran tiger in Jambi's Rimbo zoo in Indonesia, can be added to a number of similar abductions (and illegal sales) of captive tigers into the black market. China has reported similar thefts out of zoos within China. Vietnam has reported illegal sales of tigers out of zoos into the black market. (I reported all of this last year in my illegal tiger part trade- it's not new).

Given the low enforcement and reporting rates for this sort of crime there's likely to be a lot more of this. The reality of course, is that getting hold of captive tigers is actually a lot easier than trying to hunt them in the wild. You need local contacts and a bigger conspiracy (hence face increased detection risks).

One of the peculiar aspects to this trade however, is that it should (according to many conservationists) not be happening at all. Consumers of tiger parts are often asserted to have a preference for wild tiger parts. This is employed as an argument as to why tiger farms will not work. People won't want captive-tiger parts because of the assumed superiority of wild. Clearly there are people in the black market who do not share this belief. Captive tiger is a good, practical substitute (in the illegal trade sense) to wild tigers.

The reality is that the preference for wild parts is probably a very weak preference. It's kind of similar to someone preferring a red car to a blue car. But if the blue car wins in other features (better price) then the preference for red disappears from the comparison.

One thing I've been working on recently is a paper on the black-market in China for tiger-products.

Figure: Polished Sumatran Tiger Canine


Essentially, if we don't understand how this market is organised and what drives the participants, reducing poaching will be much harder.

Here's a brief outline of the main points.

• 
  There is no single black market for tiger-products. The Chinese black-market is about two products- skins and bones. The market has geographical separation. Amur (Siberian) tigers are found in the North-East, Indo-Chinese and Bengalis in the South-East, and Bengalis in the West. So far these markets are not connected.
  
  Demand is medicinal. The chief source of demand for bone is medicinal. Demand has been suppressed by Chinese law enforcement but demand has not been stigmatized. The likelihood that education campaigns will reduce demand by enough does not look credible.
  
  And most importantly- people aren't smuggling tiger-penises into China. The payoff for such aphrodisiacs aren't economic. Nobody spends $US50k for a hard-on.
  
  There is no single smuggling mode. Tiger products have entered China via bus, train, truck, plane and boat. Smugglers have a large number of potential crossing points and modes of transport. Tiger parts are a also very low volume product. Together this means that interdiction rates are dismal, and the prospect for improvement weak.
  
  Real tiger products have different distribution channels. In the West, Tibetan connections have increased the penetration of tiger skins into Qinghai and Gansu. In other regions bone is traded secretly with few intermediaries. This is likely to reflect the harsh, punitive penalties involved if caught.
  
  It's not that profitable. A lot of conservation literature claims that tiger smuggling is extremely profitable. E.g. EIA says that if a tiger costs $1500 to poach and sells for $16,500 in China, the profit is 900%. Sure, if the poacher can teleport instantly, without negotiation costs, risks and transport costs the product to the customer. The reality is that wildlife is like every other illegal market. Most of the final price comes from transport costs, compensating participants for the risks and the like. Just like drugs, procurement costs are a trivial part of the price. It's the distribution network that takes the real commitment of resources.
  
  Poachers are hard to catch Expert hunters wandering around forests in Asia can evade capture for years. Some of the participants have been at it since the 1970s. The very environment that tigers live in hinders effective policing by (under-resourced and sometimes corrupt) local rangers. If it takes 10+ years to crack a smuggling ring, then the smugglers are in the driving seat.
  

What this basically means is that poaching isn't going to be stopped in most places by law enforcement. And we can't realistically stop the flow over the Chinese border. And if the distributions are small and secretive, then good luck to anyone trying to catch them.

Words has drawn my attention to the following BBC Video (Thanks )

This covers the South China Tiger- one of the 6 surviving sub-species of Tiger.
This sub-species suffers the two main problems. The first is that it has become extinct in the wild (noting persistent rumours of it's survival do occur). The others sub-species have still been able to maintain populations in the wild. The loss of the South China tiger is based on the twin threats of loss of habitat and a Government extermination campaign in the 1960s.

The other problem has been captive breeding. South Chinese tigers in captivity often suffer a bit from inbreeding. Or, the gene pool gets diluted with cross-breeding with other subspecies. While the Chinese are petty good now at keeping bloodlines clear, they weren't 20 years ago.

Anyway, breeding success of animals intended to be 'rewilded' and 'reintroduced' to China, is rather good news.

Aah, too much to do at the moment. Tigers, alligators, butterflies and parrots...little time left over for photography or blogging.

Here's a photo I took in Harbin in July. Not an especially good shot as the vantage point was rubbish. Still, posing (at least) looks fine.