A FEW weeks ago when I went into the inner reaches of the Royal Belum Rainforest, I wondered out loud what had happened to our tigers. Are they still around? If they are, how many of them are still with us?
While distributing food to an Orang Asli community there, I asked them if they had sighted any of these tigers. This community lives very deep in the Belum rainforest, and I thought they might know.
Not too far from the village is the Thai border. Jungle border, of course. Nobody goes there unless they have bad intentions, such as poaching wild animals and stealing other jungle treasures.
An Orang Asli youth said: “Sekali sekali, kami nampak juga si Pak Belang tu” (Once in a while, we come across a tiger. Pak Belang is a common description of the tiger).
As if anticipating my question, Datuk Dr Dionysius Sharma, the chief executive officer of World Wide Fund for Nature-Malaysia (WWF-Malaysia), sent me an email about a new initiative the non-governmental organisation was embarking on. That initiative is the Save the Tiger Campaign.
Dino said: “Saving the Malaysian tiger is now beyond the assigned responsibilities of any one single government agency. It now requires the top leadership in the Malaysian government to direct the relevant ministries and agencies to take the actions required to save the tigers.”
A Malaysian forest devoid of the tiger, our dear Pak Belang from all our childhood stories, surely could not be considered a complete forest, Dino lamented. Dino is not alone in efforts to save our tigers, which, at one stage, numbered about 3,000 in the 1950s.
WWF’s tiger biologist, Dr Mark Rayan Darmaraj, said: “Ten years ago, our best guess was that the population declined to around 500 tigers.
“Recent evidence now suggests that we might have much less than this. This is why there is an urgent need to step up on our conservation efforts. Poaching is an imminent threat to tigers and other endangered species.”
Saving our tigers will not be an easy exercise. Access to our jungles needs to be tightened much further. There should be more game rangers, who are properly trained and dedicated to this initiative.
The health of our tiger population is tied to the availability of its prey species.
If we could increase the number of large prey species, such as the sambar deer, then, our tiger population would have the chance to rebound if poaching was kept in check, Darmaraj said.
This is why it is critical to protect natural resources, such as salt licks, which many tiger prey species rely on for their mineral content.
Illegal hunters seeking to make a fortune from selling every part of the tiger are the biggest threat. More severe punishment is needed, besides a greater sense of awareness on the dwindling tiger population.
WWF is working with its partners to intensify the campaign to create more awareness on the tiger problem we face. Let us hope that every one of us supports this campaign. If we don’t, the memory recall of the future generation will only be pictures of the tiger.