08 October 2003 03:25
Paw Prints Disappearing for Siberia`s Amur Tiger
Over the last six years, Yury Dunishenko has walked 12,000 kilometers through the snow. He has been looking for paw
prints left by Amur tigers, an endangered species in the Far East Khabarovsk region.
To operate such a large scale monitoring project, Dunishenko and his colleagues from the Khabarovsk Wildlife
Management Institute teamed up with a group of experienced local hunters.
Although the unlikely partnership proved successful, its findings were depressing. The number of trails on which
tiger prints were found fell from 80 in 1997 to 30 this year, and the amount of prints themselves decreased
dramatically. Even more alarming was the fact that the number of tiger cubs dropped from 28.5 percent of the total
population in 1997 to just 9.5 percent this year.
"The risk of the species' extinction has not been averted," Dunishenko said last week during a meeting
in Moscow celebrating 10 years of working to save the tigers. "The research showed that the population has lost its
ability to reproduce normally."
There are only 60 Amur tigers left in the Khabarovsk region and more than 300 still roaming the vast Primorye region.
Dunishenko said that if conditions remain unchanged, the tigers will disappear from Khabarovsk in 20 to 30 years.
Vast effort and serious investment has gone into keeping the Amur's numbers stable, but saving a large predator
such as this is a monumental task. The enormous political, economic and social change that Russia has endured since the
initiation of these efforts has not helped.
"This change has been negative," said Ed Anhert, president of the ExxonMobil Foundation, which has donated
more than $2 million to the Save the Tiger Fund. "But there is an important story to be told. Saving the tiger is
not just nature preservation, it's building strong civil society in the Far East."
Amur tigers, like tigers everywhere in the world, have long suffered from illegal poaching, depletion of prey and
loss and fragmentation of habitat due to forest fires, roads and human expansion.
Their numbers, reduced by vicious extermination at the beginning of the century to roughly a dozen, started slowly
picking up in the 1930s. In 1947, the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting. In 1972, the Amur became an internationally
recognized endangered species.
But with the arrival of the market economy came some backsliding. Impoverished Russian hunters began placing ads in
Vladivostok newspapers offering tiger hides for sale. Soon, they gained access to consumers willing to pay $120,000 for
an Amur tiger in neighboring China, where tiger hides and bones are used in traditional medicine. Customs officials
often allow poachers to cross the border in exchange for a bribe.
Research findings illustrate the scale of the poaching problem. According to Dale Miquelle, the Far East coordinator
for the Wildlife Conservation Society, 80 percent of the 47 tigers given radio monitoring collars in the course of 11
years died of unnatural causes. Most were poached. Some were killed by farmers retaliating after tigers ate their
cattle. (This is often a result of the fact that tiger prey -- deer and wild pigs -- are also being hunted to
extinction.)
All the same, some efforts made to protect the tiger have been reasonably successful. A group of international
nongovernmental organizations have worked together to create private anti-poaching teams, train customs workers and
educate the locals about the tiger's plight. By 2002, the volume of illegal contraband produced for the Chinese
market had decreased dramatically.
But an important part of the process -- lobbying for new legislation -- has stalled, particularly since the State
Nature Committee, the government environmental watchdog agency, was disbanded in 1999. The Ministry of Natural
Resources, which is now in charge of both use and protection of the environment, shelved the World Wildlife
Foundation's project to create natural parks and protected areas. Moreover, the existing ones are increasingly
under threat. Logging and deforestation have become difficult to prevent there.
Although the Russian government has been increasingly concerned with preservation, allocating three times the funds
to the environment last year than it did in 1999, neglect seeped in when the State Nature Committee was disbanded.
"The numbers of rangers and inspectors dropped," said Igor Chestin, director of the WWF Russian branch,
which acts on behalf of the Siberian tiger in the State Duma. "And pollution, particularly air pollution, grew
immensely. We taxpayers are paying three times more money for environmental protection that is much worse than we used
to get."
Because the tiger can only survive in a healthy ecosystem of the Far Eastern boreal forests -- which, incidentally,
produce most of the oxygen for the Earth's atmosphere -- its survival can stand in for the survival of our planet
as a whole.
"When we cut down these forests, which happen to be the natural habitat of the Amur tiger, or allow them to
burn, we are stepping on our own throats," said Anatoly Astafyev, director of the Sikhote-Alin reserve, home to 90
percent of all remaining Amur tigers. "If we save the tiger, we'll save ourselves."
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