wild really means. especially not, when tour packages such as these advertise wildlife reserves this way.
exciting happenings:
accidents, maulings, deaths.
what's not exciting is, 96% of India is covered by people. 4% by animals, wild animals.
when Project Tiger started in 1973, there were 1,800+ tigers. In 2007, there were 1,411.
and of course, the in-famous Sariska. where two tigers were recently translocated from Ranthambore. sadly, the forest officials couldn't translocate the third tigress, as she couldn't be found. [or did she know something about sariska we didn't--the easiest way to kill a tiger, is to shoot it inside a national park. it's like killing a man in his home. only difference is, there are too many of us.]
then i read about China. about South-Chinese Tigers being one of the most endangered animals in the world. about how it could have survived the wanton development that China undertakes. and about how IUCN believes it to be extinct in the wild.
but, a chinese official believes otherwise.
in fact, China believes tigers do exist in the wild. Proof:
unfortunately, there is a slight problem with this supposedly wild tiger's proof of existence.
apparently, the farmer who had clicked it, and the forest officials who proudly announced that the pride of their land did exist in the jungles, did not know that "A Netizen Panzhihua discovered that the tiger poster on the wall of his home shared the same features as the tiger in Zhou's photos. Even the stripes were the same. The only difference was the ears."
and slowly, the truth came out.
From a Chinese blog cum news site : Zhou Zhenglong , 53, a hunter in mountainous Zhenping county who produced photos purporting to show a South China tiger alive in the wild and who repeatedly insisted they were genuine, has been arrested on fraud charges.Seven officials were sacked, including Shaanxi forestry department's deputy director Zhu Julong - who pledged to resign should the photos prove to be fake - and six others were subject to disciplinary action.
if you are a chinese, this goes for you. did you know, that scientific evidence shows tiger bones, which are supposed to cure everything from rheumatism to blue balls, does not have any medicinal properties. that a mole rat's balls will give you the same aphrodisiacal feeling that a tiger's testicles will. or in plain simple language, your balls won't work if your balls are lousy, even if you had that tiger bone soup in the evening, no matter how hard you try to get it on with that hot woman.
in Vietnam, they advertise tiger balls saying, "eat once, make love six times a night and that will bring you four sons."
please. i am not a seafood person. but oyster sounds much more potent than a pair of balls.
the chinese incident is, however, too similar to the indian forest officials' version to go unnoticed. back in 2005, when Indian Express broke the story of the Sariska tigers, every forest official denied it. some, in fact, even said that the tigers were in hiding. Hiding-yes sir!
what the incident shows, is the great bureaucrat's propensity to show results. to show that he cannot be blamed, and that all reports of local extinction are overrated.
what the Chinese officials did not count on, was that one could trace and test digital photographs.
what is this enigma called the tiger?
Corbett wrote, "when I think of a tiger, I see a young boy about eight or nine, walking in the bush without a care in the world. And he comes face-to-face with a tiger, who looks at him, gives him a scowl as if to say 'what the hell are you doing here boy?', and walks off into the bush." [I am sorry I don't have the book to repeat the exact quotation, but in case you are interested, it's from Man Eaters of Kumaon.]
Geoffrey Ward talks of four different individuals in India, who found their calling in this striped king, and writes of each of their trials and tribulations against the 'mighty' Indian bureaucracy. Billy Arjan Singh, for example-who was single handedly responsible for setting up the Dudhwa National Park, and the bureaucrats forbid him to enter the park because he was accused of stealing firewood from the jungle. [Tigerwallahs: Saving the greatest of the great cats]
Ruth Padell writes of Ullas Karanth, who kept screaming at how tiger pugmarks were a highly unreliable way to count tigers, and quotes an interesting anecdote: Two tigers were kept in a cage, and after a couple of hours, several 'scientists' were brought in to guess how many there were inside. The lowest figure was EIGHT. the highest-17.
it is difficult to imagine how, in a country with a population that grows at nearly 2.5% a year and has the highest number of malnutritioned children in the world, can someone find it possible to even think of saving tigers. especially since a tiger pelt can get a villager more than what he can earn the entire year through his farm. but, as India's tigerwallahs have always argued, to save the tiger, you have to involve the local community.
Understand this: The world's highest demand of tiger parts come from China, a country where the tiger is supposed to have evolved first, and now has died out in the wild. The demand for tiger parts is ever-increasing, and now, China is "farming" them, like horses or cows.
And here we are, in the countries where the Tiger still roams free, atleast in a few parts.
If you are an animal-lover, hunting a cuddly-looking tiger cub will definitely not appeal to you.
If you are a nature-lover, imagining a jungle without its residents should not appeal to you.
If you are one with a conscience, driving a species extinct for its pelt and bones cannot appeal to you.
And finally, if you are a patriot [anything, any idea to poke at your conscience just to save the tiger], imagine this: your country's tigers are being killed, to sustain that old fart's sexual appetite, or that executive's exquisite lunch laced with tiger wine, must not appeal to you.
if you remember your enviromental studies 101, you must remember: kill the apex of the food chain, and the order of nature goes awry.
if you can, please pass it on, especially to any Chinese friends you might have.
as i said before, anything is plausible if it works to save the tiger.
