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peter · 10-12-2019, 02:01 AM

ON MR. LIMOUZIN'S SKULL AND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SKULLS OF DIFFERENT BIG CAT SPECIES - III (continuation of post 2,334 and post 2,356)

g - The large leopard seen near Ootacamund in 1920 and 1921

According to Mr. Van Ingen (see -c-), both Mr. Limouzin and a Col. W. had seen a very large leopard close to Dunsandle Estate in 1920 and 1921. Mr. Limouzin " ... had examined him through his glasses ... ", whereas Col. W. saw it " ... standing on a rock 20 yards away looking down on him ... " (from the letter of Mr. Van Ingen to Mr. Prater). Both said the head and fore-quarters seemed 'extremely large'. According to Col. W., who had shot " ... many panthers ... ", it was the largest he had seen.

h - Size of leopards in British India a century ago

In order to get an idea about the size of leopards in what used to be British India India, Ceylon, Burma and the southern tip of Malaysia), we could start with Pocock's great book 'The Fauna of British India', R.I. Pocock, 1939. Volume I (Mammalia, Primates and Carnivora) has 2 tables with measurements. Here's the first:

*This image is copyright of its original author

All leopards were measured 'between pegs'. The conclusion is male leopards averaged 6.11-7.0 (210,83-213,36 cm.) in total length measured in a straight line. Females shot in Ceylon were about a foot shorter than males. Adult females in India could have been a tad longer than those in Ceylon. The longest female (204,47 cm.) in the table was shot in Tounghoo (Burma).

Pocock's second table has a few skull measurements:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The table suggests that leopards shot in the northern part of British India could have been a bit larger than those shot in other regions, but one has to remember that individual variation in leopards is pronounced. There is reliable information about exceptional leopards shot in central and southern parts of India.

What I have on leopards shot in Burma suggest they could have been a bit shorter than in India and Ceylon, but leopards shot in the Naga Hills in the extreme east of India in the same period (1900-1940) more or less compared to those shot in central India and Ceylon:

*This image is copyright of its original author

i - Size of leopards in southern India

Mr. Limouzin shot his 'panther' near Ootacamund (Ooty) in southwestern India in 1921. In order to get an idea about the size of leopards in southern and southwestern India, we need measurements and weights of leopards shot in that part of India about a century ago. I found 2 tables in the JBNHS.

In July 1938, R.C. Morris (Honnametti Estate, Mysore) sent a letter with measurements of tigers, leopards, bison (gaur) and a sambar shot in southern India to the JBNHS. All leopards, measured 'between pegs', were shot in North Coimbatore. The letter was published in Vol. XL (Misc. Notes, No. IV, pp. 555):

*This image is copyright of its original author

Maj. E.G. Phythian-Adams hunted leopards and tigers in southern and southwestern India. In August 1938, he sent a letter with information on the size of leopards shot in Mysore and the Nilgiris to the JBNHS. It was published in Vol. XL (Misc. Notes, No. III, pp. 554):

*This image is copyright of its original author

The letters of R.C. Morris and Maj. E.G. Phythian-Adams suggest there wasn't much to choose between leopards shot in Ceylon and those shot in most other parts of British India a century ago. This conclusion is supported by other hunters.

The longest shot in Gir (in 1913) by a Mr. E. Brook-Fox was 7 feet and 5,5 inches (227,33 cm.) in a straight line. The next longest, also measured 'between pegs', was 7.4 (223,52 cm.). The " ... remaining males of the hundred odd mentioned above (...) gave two or three measuring 7 feet 2 inches (218,44 cm.) , the usual length was 7 feet (213,36 cm.) or slightly under. All measurements were strictly honest, taken between stakes, and not along the curves ... " (letter of E. Brook Fox of May 7, 1920 in JBNHS, Vol. XXVII, Misc. Notes, No. V, pp. 394-397).

j - Exceptional leopards and the difference between methods

The letter of Brook Fox was a response to an article of H.H. the Maharajah of Dhar on big game in the Dhar State in Vol. XXVI of the JBNHS. Brook Fox wrote:

" ... I note that out of 106 panthers shot no less than 8 have taped eight feet in length. The Indian Field Shikar book, third edition, 1906, mentions only four panthers of 8 feet and over, viz., one shot by Capt. A.G. Arbutnoth (the longest on record) 8 feet 5,5 inches. One shot by the Maharajah of Cooch Behar measuring 8 feet 4 inches. One of 8 feet 3 inches shot in Gurhwal; and one of 8 feet shot in Pauna.

I fear I am a sceptic in the matter of measurements. I speak from experience as I have been at the death of well over a hundred panthers and not one of them appraoched 8 feet when measured between upright stakes. This experience covers India from Assam to Kathiawar ... " (letter of E. Brook Fox of May 7, 1920 in JBNHS, Vol. XXVII, Misc. Notes, No. V, pp. 394-397).

All long leopards he referred to were measured 'over curves'. In his letter of May 7, 1920 (pp. 395) Brook Fox wrote a measurement taken 'over curves' adds 2-3 inches to the length 'between pegs', but the difference between both methods could be more outspoken. At least, in northeastern India.

I'm referring to measurements in 'Thirty-seven years of big game shooting in Cooch Behar, the Duars and Assam. A rough diary' (The Maharajah of Cooch Behar, Bombay, 1908). The book of the Maharajah is loaded with measurements of tigers and leopards shot by him and his guests in the period 1871-1907. All big cats were measured 'over curves', but in 1898 a limited number of tigers and leopards were measured both 'over curves' and 'between pegs'.

One large male leopard shot near the Raidak river on February 8, 1898 was 7 feet 7,5 inches (232,41 cm.) in total length measured 'over curves'. Measured 'between pegs', he was 7.2 (218,44 cm.). The difference between both methods, therefore, was 5,5 inches (13,97 cm.). Another large male leopard, also shot in 1898, was 7.6 (228,60 cm.) in total length measured 'over curves' and 7 feet 1,5 inches (217,17 cm.) when measured 'between pegs' ('Thirty-seven years of big game shooting in Cooch Behar, the Duars and Assam. A rough diary', 1908, pp. 215-216). In this case, the difference between both methods was 4,5 inches (11,43 cm.).

The Maharajah of Cooch Behar and his guests shot 311 leopards in the period 1871-1907. Of these, 5 ranged between 8.0-8.4 (243,84-254,00 cm.) in total length measured 'over curves'. Using the differences between both methods in 2 large male leopards discussed above (4,5 and 5,5 inches), chances are not one of these 5 would have reached 8.0 (243,84 cm.) 'between pegs'.

The only leopard reaching that mark (8 feet in total length measured 'between pegs') in India, as far as I know, was the 'man-eater' shot in December 2016 in the Bilaspur District in Himachal Pradesh (close to Kasjmir and Pakistan). Measured 'over curves', he was 8.7 (261,62 cm.) in total length. Here's a scan of a newspaper article in The Tribune of December 28, 2016:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Most unfortunately, details about exceptional leopards are often missing. Every now and then, however, there's a bit more. Here's a scan of a letter written in June 1928 by Lt. J.R. Stockley Roper I found in the JBNHS. He shot a large animal in Nimar in April 1923. The " ... particularly large panther ... " (from the letter below), 7.8 (233,68 cm.) in total length 'between pegs' and described as 'massive', was measured with a steel tape:

*This image is copyright of its original author

A long and robust leopard no doubt, but some male leopards shot by Maj. E.G. Phythian-Adams in Mysore (see -i-), although a bit shorter, had a bigger chest and neck. Individual variation (referring to the table of Phythian-Adams) was pronounced. Large females ranged between 6.4-6.10 and a half (193,04-209,55 cm.) in total length 'between pegs'.

Sully · 10-12-2019, 02:55 AM

Tiger to be fitted with prosthetic paw in world first operation

A tiger maimed by a poacher's trap is to be given a prosthetic paw, in a world first operation aided by a UK surgeon.
Prof Peter Giannoudis from University of Leeds earlier this week helped Indian experts carry out a preliminary operation on the seven-year-old big cat. The tiger called Sahebrao will be fitted with a artificial paw in around four weeks, in the first operation of its kind.

Sahebrao was rescued from a poacher’s trap in Gondmohadi village in Chandrapur district in 2012. His wound later developed gangrene, and a part of his injured front left leg had to be amputated. Since then, he has been living in captivity at the Wildlife Rescue Centre in Nagpur’s Gorewada Zoo.
Prof Giannoudis, an expert in fractures and bone regeneration, told the Telegraph he was advising the team and intended to be at the final operation, but said he would not comment until it was complete.
The tiger was adopted by Sushrut Babhulkar, a Nagpur-based orthopaedic surgeon, in 2016, who has since then been investigating the possibility of an artificial limb. He contacted experts abroad and teamed up with the University of Leeds.
“Now we will be able to fix the prosthetic limb within 3-4 weeks… the limb will be manufactured in Nagpur. We have taken all the necessary measurements,” he told The Indian Express, a Delhi-based daily newspaper.
“I wish to see him walk normally, like a human being getting a prosthetic leg, for the rest of his life,” he said.
Tiger numbers in India are rebounding after years of decline, the Indian government said earlier this year, rising 30 per cent since 2014. Traps still pose a threat however and many of those caught face a slow, painful death from infection.
Research based on camera traps spread across the country estimated tiger numbers had risen to just under 3,000, the government said. Other experts said last month that the rise was exaggerated because the trap photos had been misinterpreted.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/10/tiger-fitted-prosthetic-leg-world-first-operation/amp/

BorneanTiger · 10-15-2019, 10:18 AM

(08-27-2019, 03:59 PM)peter Wrote: WHY EUROPEAN ZOOS HAD NO REPRESENTATIVES OF CHINESE AND CASPIAN TIGERS

a - Colonization

In order to answer the question above, we need to start at the other end. Indonesian, Indian, Indochinese and Russian tigers were often seen in European zoos because they were caught and shipped to Europe and the Americas by professionals. In order to find, capture, sell and ship wild tigers, you first need to be there. You also need knowledge, organisation and motivation (money).

Russia and China were never occupied by European countries, but India, Indochina and Indonesia were. People in western Europe knew about tigers in these countries because they were hunted and, later, caught and shipped to Europe. European menageries and zoos were prepared to pay for them. Amur tigers were also seen because the Russians captured and sold young tigers.

This photograph was taken by Y. Saburo, a Japanese scientist. It shows a Russian trapper, his family and three tiger cubs:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Another one (with Saburo):

*This image is copyright of its original author

This photograph is from Sumatra. It shows two tigers shortly after they had been captured:

*This image is copyright of its original author

b - Conservation

Although many wild regions in southeastern Asia were cultivated, some regions in India in particular were protected to a degree. This is why tigers were able to survive for so long in most of southeastern Asia.

Amur tigers survived because the region in which they lived was transferred from China to Russia in the second half of the 20th century. Although it was colonized to a degree, cultivation was far from easy. This is why hunting always was important in the Russian Far East. The Chinese in particular were involved and the effect, in spite of the efforts of the new rulers to fight destruction, was devastating. At the turn of the century, Arseniev and Dersu (see 'Dersu the Trapper') thought everything would be gone in one or two decades.

Here's Dersu Uzala. The photograph was taken by Arseniev:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The Second World War might have saved Amur tigers. The border was closed, most of the Chinese were expelled and people like Kaplanov got a chance. Not long after the war, measures were taken to protect tigers.

c - Destruction

In order to cultivate the Caspian region, it was decided to remove tigers. Although reports about tigers still come in every now and then, they were exterminated in the forties, fifties and sixties of the previous century. Here's a captive Caspian tigress (Ognev, 1935):

*This image is copyright of its original author

In that period (just after World War Two), the Chinese also decided against tigers. The last tigers were shot in the mid-sixties. Although some survived in zoos and a few remote regions (see the series on Chinese tigers in this thread), Panthera tigris amoyensis was more or less hunted to extinction in less than two decades. This tiger was killed in 1956:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Although wild tigers were disappearing everywhere, the demand for tiger products didn't collapse. Far from it. As a result of the downfall of the tiger, prices skyrocketed. Poaching resulted in a crisis in both Russia and southeast Asia. The Russians were able to keep a few hundred Amur tigers alive, but in southeastern Asia tigers were quickly exterminated. They survived in some parts of Thailand and Malaysia, but that's about it.

Bali tigers were exterminated in the forties and fifties of the last century. Javan tigers quickly followed. Sumatra still has tigers, but they lost most of their home (the forest) and are next on the list.

d - Answers

Although wild animals were decimated in the period European countries occupied most of southeast Asia, tigers, albeit it only just, survived until the early fifties of the last century. In that period, wild tigers were captured and shipped to menageries and zoos in Europe and the Americas by professionals. This regarding Panthera tigris tigris, P.t. corbetti, P.t., P.t. balica, P.t. sondaica and P.t. sumatrae.

P.t. virgata and P.t. amoyensis were hunted to extinction in the fifties and sixties of the previous century. The campaign was a result of the decision to cultivate the Caspian region and most of central and western China. Tigers in Indonesia disappeared for the same reason in the same period.

Amur tigers survived because the Russians acquired the region in which they lived in the second half of the 19th century (a). Furthermore, the new rulers opposed the destruction caused by settlers (b). Just before the Second World War, when tigers were close to the edge, the Chinese, heavily involved in hunting, were sent to China ©. After the war, as a result of Kaplanov's warning, measures were taken to protect tigers (d).

After tigers in the Caspian region and in central parts of China had been exterminated, the demand for tiger products resulted in pressure on tigers in Russia and southeast Asia. The Russians, to a degree, were able to protect their tigers, but tigers were hunted to extinction in most of southeast Asia.

As far as I know, European zoos, apart from a few exceptions, never had Caspian and Chinese tigers. There was no information on the situation in the Caspian region and central parts of China in the fifties and sixties of the last century. The lack of information resulted in a quick end for P.t. virgata and P.t. amoyensis..

Today, the situation in the department of awareness is different. Zoos know captive tigers can contribute to more (genetic) diversity. They also know tigers can be rewilded. More than before, zoos focus on preserving a specific (sub)species.

This photograph from Tierpark Berlin has two Indochinese tigers:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Although tigers still are close to the edge, the situation has improved in some parts of Asia. In the long run, however, tigers only seem to stand a chance in Russia, the Western Ghats and the Terai Arc.

Peter, I discovered something. Do you know Eram Zoo in Tehran, where Iranian authorities are housing a couple of Indian lions that were brought from Europe earlier this year, in a bid to repopulate their country with Asiatic lions, and from where in 2010 Iran gifted Russia with Persian leopards to repopulate the North Caucasus, in return for Amur tigers to replace their Caspian relatives? The zoo was founded in the 19th century by the Qajari Shah Naser Ad-Din, who had a collection of 3 Caspian tigers from Mazandaran, 4 male and female Persian lions from the Zagros Mountains near Shiraz, 3 Persian leopards and a cheetah from Jajrud, and 5 bears (I assume Syrian brown bears) from Damavand, judging by this Farsi website of Animal Rights Watch. And I'd like to mention that Naser Ad-Din was the predecessor of Mozaffar Ad-Din, during whose reign Britain's King Edward VII brought Shirea the Persian lioness to Dublin in 1902.

epaiva · 10-23-2019, 01:45 AM

Adult male Tigers in Ranthambhore
Book A Tiger's Tale - Anup & Manoj Shah

*This image is copyright of its original author

Sully · 10-30-2019, 10:30 AM

Though somewhat dated as can be seen from the evolutionary trees, this Mazak paper on panthera zdanskyi is a very good read.

Apologies if this has been posted in this thread already, I'm aware there is much about tiger evolution here (I propose, given the very general nature of this thread now, there should be a separate one about tiger evolution specifically, with the information already posted moved there)

Abstract:

The tiger is one of the most iconic extant animals, and its origin and evolution have been intensely debated. Fossils attributable to extant pantherine species-lineages are less than 2 MYA and the earliest tiger fossils are from the Calabrian, Lower Pleistocene. Molecular studies predict a much younger age for the divergence of modern tiger subspecies at <100 KYA, although their cranial morphology is readily distinguishable, indicating that early Pleistocene tigers would likely have differed markedly anatomically from extant tigers. Such inferences are hampered by the fact that well-known fossil tiger material is middle to late Pleistocene in age. Here we describe a new species of pantherine cat from Longdan, Gansu Province, China, Panthera zdanskyi sp. nov. With an estimated age of 2.55–2.16 MYA it represents the oldest complete skull of a pantherine cat hitherto found. Although smaller, it appears morphologically to be surprisingly similar to modern tigers considering its age. Morphological, morphometric, and cladistic analyses are congruent in confirming its very close affinity to the tiger, and it may be regarded as the most primitive species of the tiger lineage, demonstrating the first unequivocal presence of a modern pantherine species-lineage in the basal stage of the Pleistocene (Gelasian; traditionally considered to be Late Pliocene). This find supports a north-central Chinese origin of the tiger lineage, and demonstrates that various parts of the cranium, mandible, and dentition evolved at different rates. An increase in size and a reduction in the relative size of parts of the dentition appear to have been prominent features of tiger evolution, whereas the distinctive cranial morphology of modern tigers was established very early in their evolutionary history. The evolutionary trend of increasing size in the tiger lineage is likely coupled to the evolution of its primary prey species.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189913/

BorneanTiger · 10-30-2019, 10:48 AM

(10-30-2019, 10:30 AM)Sully Wrote: Though somewhat dated as can be seen from the evolutionary trees, this Mazak paper on panthera zdanskyi is a very good read.

Apologies if this has been posted in this thread already, I'm aware there is much about tiger evolution here (I propose, given the very general nature of this thread now, there should be a separate one about tiger evolution specifically, with the information already posted moved there)

Abstract:

The tiger is one of the most iconic extant animals, and its origin and evolution have been intensely debated. Fossils attributable to extant pantherine species-lineages are less than 2 MYA and the earliest tiger fossils are from the Calabrian, Lower Pleistocene. Molecular studies predict a much younger age for the divergence of modern tiger subspecies at <100 KYA, although their cranial morphology is readily distinguishable, indicating that early Pleistocene tigers would likely have differed markedly anatomically from extant tigers. Such inferences are hampered by the fact that well-known fossil tiger material is middle to late Pleistocene in age. Here we describe a new species of pantherine cat from Longdan, Gansu Province, China, Panthera zdanskyi sp. nov. With an estimated age of 2.55–2.16 MYA it represents the oldest complete skull of a pantherine cat hitherto found. Although smaller, it appears morphologically to be surprisingly similar to modern tigers considering its age. Morphological, morphometric, and cladistic analyses are congruent in confirming its very close affinity to the tiger, and it may be regarded as the most primitive species of the tiger lineage, demonstrating the first unequivocal presence of a modern pantherine species-lineage in the basal stage of the Pleistocene (Gelasian; traditionally considered to be Late Pliocene). This find supports a north-central Chinese origin of the tiger lineage, and demonstrates that various parts of the cranium, mandible, and dentition evolved at different rates. An increase in size and a reduction in the relative size of parts of the dentition appear to have been prominent features of tiger evolution, whereas the distinctive cranial morphology of modern tigers was established very early in their evolutionary history. The evolutionary trend of increasing size in the tiger lineage is likely coupled to the evolution of its primary prey species.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189913/

It's called the "Longdan tiger", but the relationship between this Pleistocene cat and the modern tiger might be like the relationship between the American and Eurasian cave lions (also from the Pleistocene) and the modern lion.

Sully · 11-01-2019, 08:27 AM

How Laos lost its tigers
by Jeremy Hance on 28 October 2019

A new camera trap study finds that tigers vanished from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area by 2014, their last stand in Laos.
Leopards were killed off 10 years prior, making these big cats also extinct in Laos.
Scientists believe it’s most likely that the last tigers and leopards of Laos succumbed to snares, which are proliferating in astounding numbers across Southeast Asian protected areas.
The Indochinese tiger now only survives in Thailand and Myanmar, and may be on the edge of extinction.

The last tiger in Lao PDR likely died in terrible anguish. Its foot caught in a snare, the animal probably died of dehydration. Or maybe, in a desperate bid to free itself from a snare crafted from a simple and cheap motorbike cable, it tore off a leg and died from the blood loss. Perhaps the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), a distinct subspecies, was able to free itself from the snare, only to have the wound fester and kill it in the end. Or, and this isn’t impossible either, the last tiger of Lao PDR (or Laos) was simply shot to death by poachers who then butchered its body and sold its parts in the illegal trafficking trade to feed a seemingly insatiable demand for tiger bits and bones for sham medicine or status symbols.
However it died, it probably wasn’t peaceful.
A new paper in Global Conservation and Ecology finds that the last tigers of Laos vanished shortly after 2013 from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. And the scientists believe it was most likely a surge in snaring that did them in, despite large-scale investments in the park, relative to the region. With the loss of tigers in Laos’s largest protected area, the tiger is most likely extinct in Laos, as it probably is in both Cambodia and Vietnam. That’s an area significantly larger than Texas in Southeast Asia that’s now bereft of its proper top predator.

*This image is copyright of its original author

One of the first tiger photographed during a baseline survey. This photo is from 2003 about ten years before tigers would vanish. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
And the tiger isn’t the only victim: the researchers also believe Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri) are extinct in Laos now, wiped out from Nam Et-Phou Louey and other protected areas by the same snaring crisis.
This tragedy is simply another sign of industrial-scale “empty forest” syndrome across Southeast Asia, as poachers with guns and snares continue to wipe out animal populations, targeting anything the size of a mouse or sparrow and larger.
In the early 2000s, conservationists saw Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area as a major priority, given it still had populations of tiger, leopard and many other large mammals that had increasingly gone extinct across Southeast Asia. At the time, it was dubbed one of the most important tiger populations in the region.
In 2003 and 2004, conservationists believed there were at least seven tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey and maybe up to 23. New conservation strategies, including increased law enforcement and working with local communities, were jump started in 2005. But by 2013, researchers found only two tigers on camera trap. And no tiger has been seen since.
“This represented a sharp decline and extirpation of tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey in only 10 years,” says lead author Akchousanh Rasphone, with the Wildlife Research Conservation Unit, known as WildCRU, at the University of Oxford.
“We’ve looked at various factors for the decline, such as prey numbers and amount of guns confiscated in the park, and the only factor that seems directly related to the tiger decline was the exponential increase in snares,” she added.
Camera traps find no tigers or leopards
Rasphone and her colleagues systematically surveyed the park from 2013 to 2017 with camera traps in what they describe as the largest endeavor of its kind ever conducted in Laos.
Their survey found no leopards at all; the last one was recorded in 2004. And the last two tigers simply vanished after 2013, denoting they were most likely killed either by snare or gun.
When asked if they could have missed tigers on the camera traps, Rasphone said, “If tigers are using an area, then typically they’re easily photographed in cameras set along trails.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

An Indochinese leopard photographed in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park. Poachers wiped leopards out of the park before tigers. This animals was photographed in 2003 and was probably one of the very last leopards in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Tigers are massive, easily distinguished from other animals, tend to use well-trodden paths, and cover huge areas of territory, making photographing them far easier than many other more cryptic species on camera.
The only other place in Laos tigers were thought to maybe persist was Nakai-Nam Thuem National Biodiversity Conservation Area.
“Recent camera trapping in Nakai-Nam Thuen suggests that tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, and golden cats have now been extirpated from this protected area,” said a conservationist who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
So, tigers are very likely gone from Laos, just as they have recently been wiped out from Cambodia and Vietnam. Given all the attention and money for tigers, how did this happen?
Again.
What the #!*&*$ happened?
Jessica Hartel, the director of the Kibale Snare Removal Program in Uganda, told me in 2015 that snares are “the landmines of the forest.”
“Like landmines, snares do not discriminate, are virtually undetectable, and can cause irreversible permanent physical damage within a split second,” she said. “Like landmines, snares are unforgiving death traps that cause pain, suffering, and mutilation. Like landmines, snares are detonated automatically by way of pressure from the animals stepping into or through it.”
And big cats like tigers and leopards are “particularly vulnerable to snaring,” says Jan Kamler, co-author of the recent study also with WildCRU — even if snares are mostly set for bushmeat animals, such as deer and wild pigs.
“[Tigers and leopards] occur at relatively low densities to begin with (compared to prey species), and they have the widest ranging movements of all species,” Kamler wrote to me. “Consequently, even if snaring is stopped within a protected area, as long as snaring occurs along the boundary, then tiger and leopard populations may ultimately become extirpated.”
With only a handful of tigers left to begin with, it only takes a few encounters with snares to kill off an entire population. Ditto for leopards.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Hundreds of confiscated snares in Cambodia. These wire traps are decimating wildlife across Southeast Asia. They kill indiscriminately and cause incredible suffering to ensnared animals. Cheap and easy to make, snares are difficult for wildlife rangers to find and many parks have not adapted to this new threat. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.
Kamler theorizes that the reason leopards vanished a decade before tigers is that the presence of tigers — the apex killer in the park and known to harry other predators — forced leopards into the park’s buffer area. Here they more quickly succumbed to snares and guns that hadn’t as completely infiltrated the core area.
Research from last year in Biological Conservation found that wildlife rangers removed more than 200,000 snares from just five protected areas in Southeast Asia, including Nam-Et Phou Louey, over five years.
But Thomas Gray, the paper’s lead author and the science director for the Wildlife Alliance, told me last year that he believed even the best-trained rangers would only find a third of the snares planted in protected areas — and rangers in Nam-Et Phou Louey were not among the best, according to Gray in 2018.
“Snaring is very difficult to control because snares are cheaply made, and a single person can set hundreds and sometimes thousands of snares,” Rasphone said.
Today, millions of snares likely blanket Southeast Asia’s protected areas, indiscriminately wiping out wildlife until there is little left to kill.
‘Too little, too late’
Troy Hansel, the former Laos country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said funding and resources for Nam-Et Phou Louey came “too little too late … to secure the tiger population.”
Headed by WCS Laos, conservation groups spent between $150,000 and $200,000 annually from 2009 to 2012, according to Rasphone. The money came from international donors such as the World Bank, USFWS, and the French Development Agency (AFD). While this may sound like a lot for a developing country, the money was meant to manage a national park more than half the size of Jamaica and covered in thick forest.
Rasphone says the money definitely helped stop gun-toting poachers — gun confiscations increased with the rise of funding — but did not “stop the exponential increase in snaring.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

Hunters caught on camera trap in Laos. Some hunting is allowed in the buffer zones of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. But only for particular unprotected species and under certain regulations. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
When conservation actions really took off in 2005, conservationists had the ambitious goal of increasing tiger number by 50 percent within ten years and eventually get to a point where the protected area contained 25 breeding females—turning this park into a “source site” for Indochinese tigers, according to a 2016 paper in Biological Conservation.
Lead author of that research and also a former country director of WCS Laos, Arlyne Johnson, ,says the paper was intended to evaluate the program’s success or lack of it. It records how conservationists saw the sudden rise in snaring during that decade—and how it may have been a deliberate strategy by poachers to kill off the last tigers.
“The increased snaring likely resulted from local hunters changing techniques to more effectively target tigers,” Johnson and her colleagues wrote. “Snares were not common until Vietnamese and Chinese traders from outside the area began providing local hunters with this gear.”
While increased funding helped boost ungulate populations and curb hunters, the park needed to more than double the investment of funds even during peak funding in order to keep tigers safe, according to the study.
That kind of money never happened (this is hardly unique to Laos: conservation the world over is underfunded, under-resourced, and under-prioritized).
Johnson said that while snares definitely played a role in wiping out the park’s tigers and leopards, there were other problems: poachers were rarely arrested and convicted and, over time, funding declined.
“It has been very difficult to get enough funding to adequately support patrol teams,” said Paul Eshoo, who’s worked both in ecotourism and conservation in Laos. “As donors are not willing to support day-to-day operations and patrol staff salaries directly … and instead prefer to put most of their funds into livelihood programs.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

Even without tigers and leopards, Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park remains a hugely important protected area for rare and threatened species. This was the first ever photo of Owston’s palm civet, a species listed as endangered, in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Other issues may have been more structural. For example, Laos does not have any career rangers.
According to Eshoo, patrols in Nam-Et Phou Louey were largely made up of a motley crew of government employees, volunteers, military, and villagers —but none of whom were career park rangers, a career which simply doesn’t exist in the country.
“They are changed often, and require training by the project when they arrive,” he said. Lack of expertise, experience and high turnover certainly hurt the chances of saving the park’s tigers.
“The management system in Nam Et-Phou Louey was and still remains one of the best in the country,” Eshoo added. “But, to protect a species like the tiger, which is highly threatened, requires A+ protection with a more professional and committed national parks system in the long-term.”
Investment still mattered
Conservationists, and journalists, can get blinkered by their obsession with tigers, but, in fact, even though the investment was “too late, too late” for leopards and tigers, it’s likely had a major role in maintaining other animal populations in Laos’s largest protected area.
Johnson said other species “definitely benefited” from tiger funding as her research in 2016 showed an increase in ungulates in the park. Meanwhile, many threatened Asian animals still inhabit the park, including dholes (Cuon alpinus), clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), gaur (Bos gaurus), sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), Owston’s palm civet (Chrotogale owstoni), as well as several primate and otter species.
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) once roamed the northern portion of park, but disappeared around a decade ago, though Rasphone says there was a potential footprints were found in 2015. It may be that a herd of elephants is migrating between the park and Vietnam – but conservationists just don’t know at this point.
The loss of leopards and tigers has restructured the park’s carnivore hierarchy to potentially benefit the next biggest carnivore: dholes.
Wild dogs with a badass reputation, dholes are considered endangered on the IUCN Red List, and number fewer than tigers worldwide.
“Dholes no longer have major competition for food and space, and their populations may benefit from that,” Kamler said, though he added grimly, “as long as snaring doesn’t eventually cause the extinction of this species as well.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

A dhole in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. The wild dog is now the top predator of the park. It may benefit from a lack of tigers and leopards, but it faces many of the same challenges for long-term survival. This species is rarer than tigers globally and listed as endangered. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
As for the Indochinese tiger, Kamler says the conservation focus must now turn to Thailand and Myanmar.
“If these last few populations are not protected with strong law enforcement, then the entire subspecies will go extinct.”
Currently, the Indochinese tiger is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, but an update is overdue; that assessment was done in 2010. Today, it may very likely be critically endangered. In 2010, conservationists estimated 20 tigers in Cambodia (now extinct), 20 in Vietnam (also extinct), and 17 in Laos (alas, extinct). Thailand and Myanmar remain the only countries that likely house any semblance of a reproducing wild population. At the time, researchers believed there may be 352 Indochinese tigers left. If today it’s below 250, it would qualify for critically endangered status.
“All protected areas in Southeast Asia should be especially vigilant towards the snaring crises in the region,” Kamler said, adding that the region needs “strong community engagement and education programs.”
He also calls for continuous monitoring via camera trap so conservationists and staff on the ground can catch these declines quicker.
Perhaps most vital, according to the anonymous source, is to increase the importance of conservation across the Laos government. They said that Nam-Et Phou Louey was never “seriously recognized” by the three provincial governments that overlapped with the national park, and the national government, due to the decentralization of protected areas, took little note.
“Protected areas and species conservation are not a high priority for the government,” the source said. “National protected areas are not given the same level of authority or respect as other agencies. Protected area managers do not have even an official stamp and have lower authority than district authorities.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

An impressive gaur is photographed in the darkness at Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. Listed as vulnerable, this species is a victim of poaching for Chinese traditional medicine as well. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
The source called on groups like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and USAID to “encourage” the Laos government to support conservation and make much-needed structural changes.
“These species and habitats can bring wealth to the country if protected,” the source said.
Hasan Rahman, a tiger expert with WCS in Bangladesh, however said a final component is essential for successful tiger conservation: “public support.”
“No amount of money, arms, ammunition, forest patrol, and law enforcement can really save any species for long period of time without public support,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t need all those, but the public ownership is the key. Not only support from the people living surrounding landscape, but also from the people of the entire region, and even the world is needed to save the most of the ‘charismatic’ species.”
Laos may have lost its tigers. But the potential for conservation there remains huge, as it does in Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area.
And it’s not impossible, with far greater protection efforts across the region, that one day tigers and leopards could find their way back to Laos — assuming we can save them from extinction in the first place.

*This image is copyright of its original author

A photo of a tiger taken on the most recent survey, meaning this was one of the last tigers in Laos before it vanished. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, and WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

A sun bear, one of the park’s remaining large mammals. Photo: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

A rare image of two clouded leopards. These animals are now the biggest cats in the park. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

An incredible image of a tiger snarling in 2005 in the park. Probably one of the last individuals to survive there. How it perished no one knows. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Citations:
Gray, T.N.E., Hughes, A.C., Laurance, W.F. et al. The wildlife snaring crisis: an insidious and pervasive threat to biodiversity in Southeast Asia. Biodivers Conserv (2018) 27: 1031. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1450-5
Johnson, A., Goodrich, J., Hansel, T., Rasphone, A., Saypanya, S., Vongkhamheng, C., Venevongphet & Strindberg, S. 2016. To protect or neglect? Design, monitoring, and evaluation of a law enforcement strategy to recover small populations of wild tigers and their prey. Biological Conservation, 202: 99-109.
Rasphone, A., Kéry, M., Kamler, J.F., Macdonald, D.W., Documenting the demise of tiger and leopard, and the status of other carnivores and prey, in Lao PDR’s most prized protected area: Nam et – Phou louey, Global Ecology and Conservation (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00766 .

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/how-la...ts-tigers/

Sully · 11-01-2019, 08:32 AM

Tigers highly stressed during the tourist season in central Indian reserves
by Neha Jain on 28 October 2019

Stress hormones from tiger scat samples in Bandhavgarh and Kanha Tiger Reserves in Madhya Pradesh revealed that the charismatic cats are highly stressed during the tourist season compared with the non-tourism period in both reserves.
While the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) stipulates a maximum of 40 vehicles should be allowed in tiger reserves per day, the research team noted that both reserves accepted much higher numbers per day on average.
The study authors recommend more stringent regulation of vehicular traffic, number of tourist vehicles, shifting of artificial waterholes away from tourist roads and reducing other anthropogenic disturbances, including the relocation of villages from the core area of tiger reserves.

Ever wondered how tigers feel in response to hordes of vehicles ferrying tourists eager for the thrill of a perfect close-up encounter?
Now, a study examining stress hormones in tiger scat collected from two popular central Indian tiger reserves has revealed that these iconic carnivores suffer from high levels of physiological stress due to wildlife tourism and a large number of vehicles entering the parks.
Prolonged stress can adversely affect both survival and reproduction. “Chronically elevated glucocorticoid levels can negatively impact growth, reproductive success, immunity, and cause muscular atrophy,” explained senior author Govindhaswamy Umapathy who is a principal scientist and project leader at the Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) at CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. “If it continues it will have a definite impact on the population in the long-term.”
Interestingly, a previous study by the authors, published in 2015, showed that tigers introduced in Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan failed to reproduce, probably due to stress elicited by human disturbances.
Classed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, tigers (Panthera tigris) have lost over 95 percent of their historical global home range because of a myriad of threats from humans. This iconic species is now restricted to fragmented habitats, usually protected areas, amid human-dominated landscapes.
Meanwhile, ecotourism has soared over the decades and conservationists are concerned about its impacts on endangered wildlife. Until now, little was known about the impact of tourism on the physiology of these charismatic cats.
Scouting for scat samples
For the study, the team focused on two reserves, each home to a large population of over 60 tigers, situated in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (which was recently declared the “Tiger State” of India): Bandhavgarh and Kanha tiger reserves. Both are surrounded by a matrix of forest and land used by humans. Fifteen villages inside Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve harbour over 6000 people and a livestock population of 11,000. Similarly, the buffer zone of Kanha Tiger Reserve is home to around 129,000 people and more than 85,000 cattle.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Researchers collecting tiger scat samples to take back to the lab for extraction of the stress hormones. Photo by G. Umapathy.
In 2015, the researchers scooped up 206 tiger fresh scat samples during the tourism period between January and March and the non-tourism period, the month of September. From these samples, they extracted glucocorticoid metabolites—steroid hormones that are released when the animals are stressed—and quantified their concentrations using a cortisol enzyme immunoassay. They also determined the gender of the tiger to see if there are differences in the concentrations between males and females.
For disturbance levels due to tourism, the team gathered data from the forest department on the number of vehicles entering the parks and tourist footfall. As both reserves have multiple routes and points of entry for vehicles, sample locations were classified as ‘high’, ‘moderate’ and ‘low’ depending on the presence of livestock and villagers; wood cutting and lopping; and vehicular movements.
“Non-invasive fecal sampling and assessment of glucocorticoids (stress biomarker) provides a reliable animal-welfare friendly method for tracking the stress levels of cryptic wildlife species such as the tiger,” said Edward Narayan, senior lecturer of animal science at Western Sydney University, who was not involved in the study and specialises in non-invasive reproductive and stress endocrinology.
Tigers experience soaring stress levels
Tigers exhibited higher levels of glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations in both reserves during the tourism period compared with the non-tourism period, meaning that they were more stressed when tourists are around. And while the authors had anticipated a slight increase in stress, what they found was much higher. “It was expected to be a slight increase but a significant increase was recorded,” Umapathy said.
They did not find any significant differences in the glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations between males and females during both tourism and non-tourism periods.
“Stress plays a pivotal role in the ecology of wildlife species and increased perceived stressors in the wild. For example, human-induced disturbances can cause significant changes across the brain-endocrine-tissue pathways leading to over-expression of the stress biomarker (cortisol),” explained Narayan. “Cortisol can have life-long significant negative impact on all aspects of wildlife ecology including growth and development, maturation, reproductive fitness, behaviour and survival.”
What’s more, the glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations grew higher in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve as the level of disturbance and the number of vehicles increased.

*This image is copyright of its original author

As the levels of human disturbance, including vehicular movement, increased in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, so did the average faecal glucocorticoid concentration showing that tigers were more stressed as human disturbance increased. Figure from Tyagi et al. 2019.
Regulating vehicular entry to tiger reserves
Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve received 106, 535 visitors while Kanha Tiger Reserve accepted 137, 644 people during a 9-month long tourism season from October 2014 to June 2015. To travel inside the reserve, an average of 85 vehicles were used per day in the former reserve and the latter accepted 106 per day.
Tourism is restricted to only 20 percent of the core areas of the reserves and a maximum of 40 cars per day are permitted as per guidelines laid down by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) in their 2010 management plan.
While the authors did not quantify how much of the core area was used for tourism, they noted that it appeared higher than the 20 percent suggested by the NTCA. Additionally, they pointed out that both reserves have permitted much higher numbers of vehicles than the 40 recommended by the NTCA, especially Kanha Tiger Reserve, which allowed an average of 106 vehicles per day.
The findings have implications for the management of reserves and conservation. Some of the measures advised by the authors are more stringent regulation of vehicular traffic and the number of tourist vehicles entering the reserves; shifting of artificial waterholes away from tourist roads; and reducing other human disturbances, including the relocation of villages from the core area of tiger reserves.
Umapathy also highlighted the need to conduct similar studies in other Indian tiger reserves and also to examine the impact of increased glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations on the reproductive potential of the wild cats in the long-term.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Tourist vehicles near a tiger at Sariska Tiger Reserve. Photo by Subhadeep Bhattacharjee.
CITATION
Tyagi, A., Kumar, V., Kittur, S., Reddy, M., Naidenko, S., Ganswindt, A., & Umapathy, G. (2019). Physiological stress responses of tigers due to anthropogenic disturbance especially tourism in two central Indian tiger reserves. Conservation Physiology, 7(1), coz045.

https://india.mongabay.com/2019/10/tiger...-reserves/

peter · 11-02-2019, 04:45 AM

WILD TIGERS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA - THE SITUATION IN 2019

a - Introduction

Before continuing with the series on Mr. Limouzin's skull, I decided for a post on wild tigers in southeast Asia. The reason is I read a number of newspaper articles and papers recently. Although those interested in the natural world no doubt read some of these articles, most people in Europe and the USA are not aware of the situation in southeast Asia. They should be, as the news is far from good.

b - Sources

This post, a result of quite a bit of work, is based on nine articles. Apart from the first, all were published this year (2019):

1 - 'Tiger farms still operate in Laos, defying trafficking bans' (19-01-2018, Radion Free Asia)
2 - 'Vietnamese crime syndicats target Thailand's last tigers' (24-01-2019, The Guardian, R. Austin)
3 - 'How China's WeChat became a grim heart of illegal animal trading' (11-03-2019, Wired.UK, P. Yeung)
4 - 'Malaysia arrests Vietnam poachers, seizes tiger, bear parts' (16-04-2019, https://phys.org/news/2019/04)
5 - 'Tiger poaching remains a threat to the iconic predators' (18-04-2019, Sustainability Times, D.T. Cross)
6 - 'Poachers fined RM 1,56 mil, the biggest yet for wildlife crime' (16-05-2019, Star Online)
7 - 'SE Asia's tigers hit hard by tourism, captive breeding' (21-06-2019, Asian Times, J. Pollard)
8 - 'Poaching Facts - Truths from the front-line' (26-10-2019, http://www.poachingfacts.com)
9 - 'How Laos lost its tigers' (28-10-2019, Mongabay, J. Hance)

I selected three articles to write the post, but used photographs published in some of the others as well. Apart from the articles mentioned above, I read numerous others as well as a few papers and reports, all published this year. The information in this post is both up-to-date and reliable.

Those interested in wild tigers won't enjoy reading this post, but they also know the world is changing real fast these days. What, tigernumberwise, was true a decade ago, is outdated today. Reliable and accurate information is needed to understand the situation and get to decisions. And decisions are needed. In most of Southeast Asia, the future doesn't look good.

c - Bangkok tiger forum 2019 (J. Pollard, Asian Times, 21-06-2019)

In June this year, a panel of tiger experts outlined the status of tigers. Here's a photograph showing some of the participants:

*This image is copyright of its original author

c1 - The number of wild tigers in southeast Asia

According to Tim Redford, a program director and wildlife veteran with Freeland Foundation, the outlook in Thailand and neighbouring countries, to put it mildly, is disturbing. In Cambodja, Laos and Vietnam, there are either no tigers or viable breeding populations. In northern Myanmar, less than 5 tigers remain.

In India, thanks to strong government policies (such as proper funding of national parks) and good work of by forest and conservation groups, the number of wild tigers had risen to about 2,200. Even so, 51 tigers were poached in India in the first 5 months of this year (2019).

Here's a bit more on tiger mortality in India (source: -b-, article -8-). In the period 2011-2017, at least 106 tigers, and perhaps as much as 223, were poached. According to Redford, 51 were added in the first five months of this year. As only few traffickers are caught, the real number is significantly higher:

*This image is copyright of its original author

c2 - Main threats

The main threats for tigers are infrastructure projects (like China's Belt and Road Initiative) and social media. Infrastructure projects will divide forests into small fragments and social media " ... is guiding poachers into areas where they (tigers) are ... ". Poachers are traveling from Vietnam to Sumatra and Malaysia to hunt tigers. In Laos and Cambodja " ... we see the poachers writing on trees, marking out their territory ... ".

In European newspapers, you can find articles about the methods used by rangers to discourage poachers. Although it's true that locals have been treated in a harsh way in some cases, " ... people forget that at least 150 rangers are killed every year - that's three a week - by poachers in parks and sanctuaries around the world ... ".

c3 - Thailand

Thailand's Department of National Parks is doing a very good job. The Thai government recently upgraded the 27-year old Wildlife Preservation Act. The new act will come into force in a few months. The new law " ... has tougher penalties and the option for civil cases - fines of up to 2 million bath (almost $65,000) for loss of biodiversity, and up to 10 years in jail for people convicted of serious wildlife crimes ... ".

Thai rangers are well-trained. Here's a photograph of an elite ranger group ('Hasadin'):

*This image is copyright of its original author

But tourism is a problem. According to Wiek, founder and director of the Wildlife Friends Foundation in Thailand, there are " ... more than 44 places with tigers and they're often kept in small cages. He showed a short video of a tourist poking a tiger with a stick at one attraction ... ".

c4 - CITES

Although CITES (the world body overseeing the trade in wildlife and flora) called for an end to the captive breeding of tigers in 2007, the non-binding resolution was, and still is, opposed by a number of Asian countries. In Thailand and Laos alone, there are 69 facilities today. Many conservationists regard these 'facilities' as safe-houses for illegal wildlife trading. They are " ... linked to a huge trade in lion and tiger bones ... ". Most products are sold to Vietnamese and Chinese tourist for considerable sums.

Here's a photograph of a tiger farm in China:

*This image is copyright of its original author

c5 - Value

In the end, it is, as always, about money. According to Chris Perkin, the regional manager for Thailand and central Asia for the UK Border Force, the British government takes wildlife crimes very seriously, " ... because it is a major facet of organized crime, worth more than $21 billion a year globally ... ".

d - Sin City (P. Yeung, Wired.UK, 11-03-2019)

d1 - Bokeo

The region of Bokeo in northern Laos is a 10,000-hectare special economic zone in northern Laos. Owned by the notorious Hong Kong firm Kings Romans since 2007, the complex, three times the size of Macau, offers " ... a slew of hotels and shops, a zoo, a shooting range and thousands of immigrant workers who live in spartan, on-site dormitories. Most visitors drive from the nearby Chinese province of Yunnan, or fly to northern Thailand and cross the Mekong on speedboats, to wager piles of money in air-conditioned silence for 24 hours a day, seven days a week ... ".

Apart from the narcotics business, the region is also a hotbed for the illegal wildlife trade. In a 2015 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Bokeo was described as a 'lawless playground' that functioned as a kind of 'illegal wildlife supermarket'. This although Laos joined an agreement in 2004 (referring to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Animal Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as CITES).

d2 - Sanctions

It resulted in US santions, which " ... froze all assets under its jurisdiction and identified four key individuals, including casineo owner Zhao Wei, as part of a network that engaged in 'horrendous illicit activities' including drugs production, child protitution, and wildlife trafficking ... ".

After the sanctions, the cages and crowds more or less disappeared. But not quite, says Debbie Banks, campaign leader for tiger and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency: " ... I would say it's gone under the counter - not underground. These illegal traders and wildlife criminals are all using social media. Once you connect with them, there's a world of wildlife products ... ".

Banks, a zoologist by training and a leading figure in the battle against wildlife trafficking, spent more than two decades uncovering the trade in Europe, the USA and Japan and led key investigations in China and Tibet in 2005 and then Bokeo, Laos, in 2015. She " ... witnessed a cosmetic law enforcement response to our findings, she says of the latter (Laos). In 2014 or 2015, I could walk about the special economic zone and see tiger skins, stuffed tigers, ivory tusks, ivory carvings, rhino horn shavings, menus with sauteed tiger meat and bone wine. But no one was actually prosecuted or arrested ... ".

d3 - Poaching

The decrease in the number of wild tigers is mainly a result of poaching, " ... largely due to rocketing demand from China, where some people consider wearing, displaying, or consuming tiger products a coveted status symbol. Years of double-digit growth has equipped China's middle class with money to spend ... ". On the supply side, " ... the incentives are obvious. A pair of illegal rhino horns can be bought for $167 in Africa, according to research by international wildlife investigators. Once carved and delivered to the right market, they could be worth some $60,000 - 400 times the original price. The illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated $20 billion ... ".

Here's a photograph showing parts of cats seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service Law Enforcement, US National Wildlife Property Repository (photograph Wendy Worrell Redal, 2015):

*This image is copyright of its original author

d4 - Laos

Transportation trafficking routes often pass " ... through Laos, which shares somewhat porous borders with China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Jaguar is poached from Latin America and lion from Africa to be sold as tigers at places like the San Jiang market in the Laotian capital Vientiane. Laos is a crucial part of the supply chain, says Steven Galster, director of the Bangkok-based Freeland Foundation. But the country has received several sanctions for failing to enforce CITES regulations. 'It's a systematic problem', says a wildlife expert in southeast Asia, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. There's no proactivity, follow-through or long term planning by the Laos government ... ".

d5 - Social media

Another potentially greater issue is that traffickers are adopting more sophisticated methods: " ... Most shops hide their products, do deals behind closed doors and have exclusive meetings with tourist groups', the expert says. 'We need to monitor the social media accounts now. I know dozens WeChat accounts with illegal product for sale. Every week they'll show stock. There are so many rhino horns ... ".

WeChat, which recently reached one billion monthly users (...), is difficult to police. Bingchun Meng, professor of media and communication at the London School of Economics, doesn't think it will be regulated in the near future. Although an international coalition of tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent, aim to reduce wildlife trafficking online by 80 percent by 2020, experts are cynical.

d6 - The situation today

For now, confusion reigns. " ... 'The lack of clarity does not help the wildlife enforcement authorities to do their job', says Gabriel Fava of the Born Free Foundation. 'We almost immediately heard of contacts in west Bengal being approached for tigers. It's not helped by the wilful obfuscation by Chinese authorities - perhaps they're trying to hide their real intentions behind conservation claims'. The continued existence of tiger farms in Laos is a bone of contention, fuelling the belief that powerful interest groups are perpetuating the illegal wildlife trade. 'There's been a very persistent, large industrial body ... that has been lobbying for this a number of years', adds campaigner Debbie Banks ...".

Captive tigers are showing up in the illegal trade. " ... Estimates by the EIA, ..., suggest that 38 per cent of live, frozen, and taxidermied tigers seized by law enforcement between 2010 and mid-2018 were from captive sources like tiger farms ... ".

e - Laos (J. Hance, Mongabay, 28-10-2019)

e1 - Tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area

This Protected Area is a National Park more than half the size of Jamaica and covered in thick forest. Headed by WCS Laos, " ... conservation groups spent between $150,000 and $200,000 annually from 2009 to 2012, according to Rasphone (Akchousanh Rasphone, with the Wildlife Conservation Unit, is a lead author at the University of Oxford). The money came from international donors such as the World Bank, USFWS, and the French Development Agency (AFD) ... " (pp. 8).

Here's a nice photograph of Nam-Et Phou Louey:

*This image is copyright of its original author

According to Troy Hansel, the former Laos country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) " ... funding and resources for Nam-Et Phou Louey came 'too little too late ... to secure the tiger population ... " (pp. 8).

A National Park in Laos half the size of Jamaica and no tigers? Yes: " ... In 2003 and 2004, conservationists believed there were at least seven tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey and maybe up to 23. But by 2013, researchers found only two tigers on camera trap. And no tiger has been seen since. Rasphone and her collegues systematically surveyed the park from 2013 to 2017 with camera traps in what they describe as the largest endeavor of its kind ever conducted in Laos. Their survey found no leopards at all; the last one was recorded in 2004. And the last two tigers simply vanished after 2013 ... " (pp. 3,4).

Arlene Johnson, also a former country director of WCS Laos, said " ... other species 'definitely benefited' from tiger funding as her research in 2016 showed an increase in ungulates in the park ... " (pp. 11). But all leopard and tigers are gone. " ... The loss of leopards and tigers has restructured the park's carnivore hierarchy to potentially benefit the next biggest carnivore: dholes ... " (pp. 11).

e2 - Government

In Laos, " ... protected areas and species conservation are not a high priority for the government. Protected area managers do not have even an official stamp and have lower authority than district authorities ... ". According to an anonymous source " ... Nam-Et Phou Louey was never 'seriously recognized' by the three provincial governments that overlapped with the national park, and the national government, due to the decentralization of protected areas, took little notice ... " (pp. 13).

One of the results was that poachers were rarely " ... arrested and convicted ... " (pp. 9). On top of that, Laos does not have career rangers. Patrols in Nam-Et Phou Louey were largely " ... made up of a motley crew of government employees, volonteers, military, and villagers ... " (pp. 10). Meaning experienced poachers can do as they please.

e3 - Snares

Rasphone thinks the money (see -e1-) " ... 'definitely helped' stop gun-toting poachers' - gun confiscations increased with the rise of funding -  but did not 'stop the exponential increase in snaring' ... " (pp. 8). According to Arlene Johnson " ... the increased snaring likely resulted from local hunters changing techniques to more effectively target tigers. Snares were not common until Vietnamese and Chinese traders from outside the area began providing local hunters with this gear ... " (pp.9).

Jessica Hartel, director of the Kibale Snare Removal Program in Uganda, is very clear about the effects of snaring: " ... Snares are the landmines of the forest. Like landmines, snares do not discriminate, are virtually undetectable, and can cause irreversible permanent fysical damage within a split second. Like landmines, snares are unforgiving death traps that cause pain, suffering and mutilation. Like landmines, snares are detonated automatically by way of pressure from the animals stepping into or through it ... " (pp. 5,6).

Big cats like leopards and tigers in particular are vulnarable. With " ... only a handful of tigers to begin with, it only takes a few encounters with snares to kill off an entire population. Ditto for leopards ... " (pp. 6).

Research from last year in 'Biological Conservation' found that " ... wildlife rangers removed more than 200,000 snares from just five protected areas in Southeast Asia, including Nam-Et Phou Louey, over five years ... " (pp. 7). According to Thomas Gray, lead author of the paper published in 'Biological Conservation' and science director for the Wildlife Alliance, " ... even the best-trained rangers would only find a third of the snares planted in protected areas - and rangers in Nam-Et Pouh Louey were not the best ... " (pp. 7).

Here's photograph I found in the article of Mongabey (see -b-, article -9-):

*This image is copyright of its original author

e4 - Status of the Indochinese tiger today

It's more than likely that millions of snares " ... blanket Southeast Asia's protected areas ... " (pp. 8). As a result, tigers have all but disappeared. In 2010, " ... conservationists estimated 20 tigers in Cambodia (now extinct), 20 in Vietnam (also extinct), and 17 in Laos (alas, extinct). Thailand and Myanmar remain the only countries that likely house any semblance of a reproducing wild population. At the time, researchers believed there may be 352 Indochinese tigers left. If today it's below 250, it would qualify for critically endangered status ... " (pp. 12).

f - Summary

f1 - Years of double-digit growth equipped China's middle class with money to spend. As wearing, displaying or consuming tiger products is regarded as a coveted status symbol, the demand for tiger products has skyrocketed. On the supply side, the incentives are obvious. In Africa, a pair of rhino horns is available for less than $200. Once carved and delivered to the right market, they're sold for $60,000 (400 times the original price).

Here's a photograph of illegal ivory products destroyed in China:

*This image is copyright of its original author

f2 - The illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated $20 billion. A lot of money, that is. As money always is decisive, legislation only isn't going to change the situation. Not in countries where many people struggle to make a living. Law enforcement can affect trafficking to a degree, but training and equipping rangers is a costly and time-consuming affair. The problem is donors are not that keen on funding regular patrols. One reason is they don't want to be connected to the consequences of violence.

Violence? I'm afraid so. In countries that have well-stocked reserves and national parks, chances are rangers will be confronted by well-armed poachers sooner or later. These confrontations are far from friendly. Every week, 3 rangers are killed by poachers.

I never read anything about rangers shot by poachers in newspapers. When villagers entering a protected reserve in order to feed their cattle are discouraged to do so in a somewhat clumsy way, however, they (referring to articles I read in Dutch newspapers) can make headlines. If a ranger doing his job (or acting in self-defence) shoots a poacher, he can expect both a bad press and serious legal problems. When a ranger accepting a bribe (most rangers are seriously underpaid) is caught, however, he can expect quite a bit of understanding.

Meaning patrols have limited value. In Thailand and Laos, poachers are so confident that they write on trees, " ... marking out their territories ... " (see -b-, article -7-, pp. 2). Also meaning endangered wild animals are basically on their own. As a result, many species are very close to extinction.

Here's a photograph that was published in The Guardian (see -b-, article -2-) in January this year. It was found on one of the phones of two men arrested in Thailand about a year ago. The two, members of a Vietnam-based syndicate, tried to transport (the remains of) a tiger they had poached in Thailand. Thai authorities " ... are still trying to establish the identity of the poacher in the photograph, believing he and others are behind previous killings of tigers and other wildlife at the behest of crime syndicats ..." (see -b-, article 2):

*This image is copyright of its original author

f3 - Based on what's known (referring to both research and newspaper reports), it's clear that those interested in tiger products in China are funding the illegal wildlife trade. This means Chinese nationals most probably lead crime syndicats involved in trafficking in some way or another. The articles and papers I read suggest most of these syndicats operate in Vietnam.

Not a few convicted poachers are Vietnamese nationals. In Thailand (referring to -b-, article -2-), Malaysia (referring to -b-, article -6-), Laos (see -b-, article 9, pp. 9), and, most probably, Cambodia and Sumatra, these representatives of syndicats fund and supply locals to help them find tigers and transport the carcasses (or the bones) to Vietnam. Later, the (dressed) remains are transported to Laos and China. In China, traders use social media (and WeChat in particular) to inform those interested in tiger products. Tiger products are also sold in Bokeo, a large 'special economic zone' in northern Laos.

Although Laos, a " ... crucial part of the supply chain ... " (see -b-, article -3-), and a number of individuals heavily involved in trafficking were hit by US sanctions in January 2019 (see -b-, article -3-), there's still " ... no proactivity, follow-through or long-term planning by the Laos government ... " (see -b-, article -3-). Meaning the effect of sanctions is limited.

f4 - As a result of the growing demand for tiger products and the limited number of wild tigers, the Chinese decided to breed tigers in facilities now known as 'tiger-farms' some time ago. Although directors deny tigers bred on their 'farms' are sold to traders, experts disagree: " ... Estimates of the EIA, which take the circumstances of trafficking and condition of skin into consideration, suggest that 38 per cent of live, frozen, and taxidermied tigers seized by law enforcement between 2010 and mid-2018 were from captive sources like tiger farms ... " (see -b-, article 9).

Experts also think that quite a few tigers displayed in (dozens of) zoo-like facilities in China, Laos and Thailand end up in shops sooner or later. Apart from that, tourism is becoming a massive problem. Thailand " ... featured prominently in a report by National Geographic this month (June 2019) on the 'dark side of wildlife tourism' with pictures of distressed animals at a notorious crocodile farm and zoo near Bangkok, which caters to busloads of Chinese tourists, plus other sites which activists say should be improved so tigers, elephants and other animals enjoy less onerous conditions ... " (see -b-, article 7).

f5 - Conservation starts at the level of politics. In Russia, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand and Malaysia, conservation is on the agenda of politicians. The result is these countries still have tigers. In Russia, India and Nepal, the number of wild tigers has even increased in the last years.

Here's well-known photograph posted before. It shows Mr. Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, and a number of researchers and rangers close to a darted wild Amur tigress. I know Amur tigers are different from Indochinese tigers, but it is about the message. The photograph says Mr. Putin is interested in the natural world, in conservation and in tigers. This is what those involved in conservation and fighting traffickers need. Compare his message regarding conservation to the one on endangered wild animals recently left by the American President. It makes a difference:

*This image is copyright of its original author

China is a leading force in Asia. In October 2019, she stunned the international community by reversing a 25-year old ban on using tiger bones and rhinoceros horn for scientific and medical purposes. As a result of a wave of protests, the change was " ... postponed after study ... " (see -b-, article 3).

At the moment, the intentions in the department of conservation are unclear. If the Chinese authorities would take a clear position regarding conservation, it no doubt would have an impact on politicians in neighbouring countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

f6 - In 2010, conservationists thought Southeast Asia had 300-400 wild tigers. Today, the tiger is extinct in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Only Thailand, Malaysia and, perhaps, the southern part of Myanmar have wild tigers. Jeremy Hance, the author of 'How Laos lost its tigers' (see -b-, article 9), talked to a number tiger authorities. They think there are less than 250 wild tigers in Malaysia, Thailand and the southern part of Myanmar. This means Panthera tigris corbetti now is 'critically endangered'.

g - Members of Wildfact

Those of us able to find reliable information about impressive wild tigers in, for example, India not seldom add details about their whereabouts. According to Tim Redford, a program director and wildlife veteran with Freeland Foundation, " ... social media is guiding poachers into areas where they (tigers) are ... " (see -b-, article 7, pp. 2).

Those involved in trafficking no doubt know about forums like Wildfact. The big cat department (referring to the extinction threads in particular) of Wildfact is well-developed and offers a lot of good information. Our advice is to keep this in mind.

Our aim is to contribute to more awareness about the plight of those making their home in the natural world. We want to inform the general public about the beauty of this forgotten world. Apex predators like tigers do not 'live' in documentaries and fancy magazines. They're very real and so are the national parks and reserves where they make their home.

If we are unable to stop poaching, the result, at best, will be a few bones here and there. Here's a photograph of a poached tiger (2007, V. Menon):

*This image is copyright of its original author

If we're able to overcome the problems discussed in this post, chances are wild tigers will quickly recover. This family was discovered in the eastern part of Thailand only a few years ago:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Here's a male Thailand tiger (cameratrap) to finish the post:

*This image is copyright of its original author

johnny rex · 11-02-2019, 02:19 PM

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/johors-sultan-warns-poachers-they-will-be-hunted-down-after-tiger-traps-found-in

According to this news, four tigers including seemingly two white tigers were observed in Johor which is in Southern Peninsular Malaysia. You can see the picture showing the tigers in the link above and the picture below.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Aren't only Bengal tigers could have white colouration? Or is there a possibility that those tigers were actually captive Bengal specimens that were released into the jungle?

Shadow · 11-02-2019, 02:53 PM

(11-02-2019, 02:19 PM)johnny rex Wrote: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/johors-sultan-warns-poachers-they-will-be-hunted-down-after-tiger-traps-found-in

According to this news, four tigers including seemingly two white tigers were observed in Johor which is in Southern Peninsular Malaysia. You can see the picture showing the tigers in the link above and the picture below.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Aren't only Bengal tigers could have white colouration? Or is there a possibility that those tigers were actually captive Bengal specimens that were released into the jungle?

All species have time to time individuals with (would the right word be) mutations causing abnormal individuals. Difficult to see, that only Bengal tigers could have some variations and other subspecies not. Another thing is, that if so far those have been found only within Bengal tigers. In things like this, it´s impossible to rule out something just because never seen before. Evolution works all the time. Naturally slowly, but it´s there.

GuateGojira · 11-04-2019, 09:55 PM

(11-01-2019, 08:27 AM)Sully Wrote: How Laos lost its tigers
by Jeremy Hance on 28 October 2019

A new camera trap study finds that tigers vanished from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area by 2014, their last stand in Laos.

Leopards were killed off 10 years prior, making these big cats also extinct in Laos.

Scientists believe it’s most likely that the last tigers and leopards of Laos succumbed to snares, which are proliferating in astounding numbers across Southeast Asian protected areas.

The Indochinese tiger now only survives in Thailand and Myanmar, and may be on the edge of extinction.

The last tiger in Lao PDR likely died in terrible anguish. Its foot caught in a snare, the animal probably died of dehydration. Or maybe, in a desperate bid to free itself from a snare crafted from a simple and cheap motorbike cable, it tore off a leg and died from the blood loss. Perhaps the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), a distinct subspecies, was able to free itself from the snare, only to have the wound fester and kill it in the end. Or, and this isn’t impossible either, the last tiger of Lao PDR (or Laos) was simply shot to death by poachers who then butchered its body and sold its parts in the illegal trafficking trade to feed a seemingly insatiable demand for tiger bits and bones for sham medicine or status symbols.
However it died, it probably wasn’t peaceful.
A new paper in Global Conservation and Ecology finds that the last tigers of Laos vanished shortly after 2013 from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. And the scientists believe it was most likely a surge in snaring that did them in, despite large-scale investments in the park, relative to the region. With the loss of tigers in Laos’s largest protected area, the tiger is most likely extinct in Laos, as it probably is in both Cambodia and Vietnam. That’s an area significantly larger than Texas in Southeast Asia that’s now bereft of its proper top predator.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorOne of the first tiger photographed during a baseline survey. This photo is from 2003 about ten years before tigers would vanish. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
And the tiger isn’t the only victim: the researchers also believe Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri) are extinct in Laos now, wiped out from Nam Et-Phou Louey and other protected areas by the same snaring crisis.
This tragedy is simply another sign of industrial-scale “empty forest” syndrome across Southeast Asia, as poachers with guns and snares continue to wipe out animal populations, targeting anything the size of a mouse or sparrow and larger.
In the early 2000s, conservationists saw Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area as a major priority, given it still had populations of tiger, leopard and many other large mammals that had increasingly gone extinct across Southeast Asia. At the time, it was dubbed one of the most important tiger populations in the region.
In 2003 and 2004, conservationists believed there were at least seven tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey and maybe up to 23. New conservation strategies, including increased law enforcement and working with local communities, were jump started in 2005. But by 2013, researchers found only two tigers on camera trap. And no tiger has been seen since.
“This represented a sharp decline and extirpation of tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey in only 10 years,” says lead author Akchousanh Rasphone, with the Wildlife Research Conservation Unit, known as WildCRU, at the University of Oxford.
“We’ve looked at various factors for the decline, such as prey numbers and amount of guns confiscated in the park, and the only factor that seems directly related to the tiger decline was the exponential increase in snares,” she added.
Camera traps find no tigers or leopards
Rasphone and her colleagues systematically surveyed the park from 2013 to 2017 with camera traps in what they describe as the largest endeavor of its kind ever conducted in Laos.
Their survey found no leopards at all; the last one was recorded in 2004. And the last two tigers simply vanished after 2013, denoting they were most likely killed either by snare or gun.
When asked if they could have missed tigers on the camera traps, Rasphone said, “If tigers are using an area, then typically they’re easily photographed in cameras set along trails.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn Indochinese leopard photographed in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park. Poachers wiped leopards out of the park before tigers. This animals was photographed in 2003 and was probably one of the very last leopards in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Tigers are massive, easily distinguished from other animals, tend to use well-trodden paths, and cover huge areas of territory, making photographing them far easier than many other more cryptic species on camera.
The only other place in Laos tigers were thought to maybe persist was Nakai-Nam Thuem National Biodiversity Conservation Area.
“Recent camera trapping in Nakai-Nam Thuen suggests that tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, and golden cats have now been extirpated from this protected area,” said a conservationist who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
So, tigers are very likely gone from Laos, just as they have recently been wiped out from Cambodia and Vietnam. Given all the attention and money for tigers, how did this happen?
Again.
What the #!*&*$ happened?
Jessica Hartel, the director of the Kibale Snare Removal Program in Uganda, told me in 2015 that snares are “the landmines of the forest.”
“Like landmines, snares do not discriminate, are virtually undetectable, and can cause irreversible permanent physical damage within a split second,” she said. “Like landmines, snares are unforgiving death traps that cause pain, suffering, and mutilation. Like landmines, snares are detonated automatically by way of pressure from the animals stepping into or through it.”
And big cats like tigers and leopards are “particularly vulnerable to snaring,” says Jan Kamler, co-author of the recent study also with WildCRU — even if snares are mostly set for bushmeat animals, such as deer and wild pigs.
“[Tigers and leopards] occur at relatively low densities to begin with (compared to prey species), and they have the widest ranging movements of all species,” Kamler wrote to me. “Consequently, even if snaring is stopped within a protected area, as long as snaring occurs along the boundary, then tiger and leopard populations may ultimately become extirpated.”
With only a handful of tigers left to begin with, it only takes a few encounters with snares to kill off an entire population. Ditto for leopards.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorHundreds of confiscated snares in Cambodia. These wire traps are decimating wildlife across Southeast Asia. They kill indiscriminately and cause incredible suffering to ensnared animals. Cheap and easy to make, snares are difficult for wildlife rangers to find and many parks have not adapted to this new threat. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.
Kamler theorizes that the reason leopards vanished a decade before tigers is that the presence of tigers — the apex killer in the park and known to harry other predators — forced leopards into the park’s buffer area. Here they more quickly succumbed to snares and guns that hadn’t as completely infiltrated the core area.
Research from last year in Biological Conservation found that wildlife rangers removed more than 200,000 snares from just five protected areas in Southeast Asia, including Nam-Et Phou Louey, over five years.
But Thomas Gray, the paper’s lead author and the science director for the Wildlife Alliance, told me last year that he believed even the best-trained rangers would only find a third of the snares planted in protected areas — and rangers in Nam-Et Phou Louey were not among the best, according to Gray in 2018.
“Snaring is very difficult to control because snares are cheaply made, and a single person can set hundreds and sometimes thousands of snares,” Rasphone said.
Today, millions of snares likely blanket Southeast Asia’s protected areas, indiscriminately wiping out wildlife until there is little left to kill.
‘Too little, too late’
Troy Hansel, the former Laos country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said funding and resources for Nam-Et Phou Louey came “too little too late … to secure the tiger population.”
Headed by WCS Laos, conservation groups spent between $150,000 and $200,000 annually from 2009 to 2012, according to Rasphone. The money came from international donors such as the World Bank, USFWS, and the French Development Agency (AFD). While this may sound like a lot for a developing country, the money was meant to manage a national park more than half the size of Jamaica and covered in thick forest.
Rasphone says the money definitely helped stop gun-toting poachers — gun confiscations increased with the rise of funding — but did not “stop the exponential increase in snaring.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorHunters caught on camera trap in Laos. Some hunting is allowed in the buffer zones of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. But only for particular unprotected species and under certain regulations. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
When conservation actions really took off in 2005, conservationists had the ambitious goal of increasing tiger number by 50 percent within ten years and eventually get to a point where the protected area contained 25 breeding females—turning this park into a “source site” for Indochinese tigers, according to a 2016 paper in Biological Conservation.
Lead author of that research and also a former country director of WCS Laos, Arlyne Johnson, ,says the paper was intended to evaluate the program’s success or lack of it. It records how conservationists saw the sudden rise in snaring during that decade—and how it may have been a deliberate strategy by poachers to kill off the last tigers.
“The increased snaring likely resulted from local hunters changing techniques to more effectively target tigers,” Johnson and her colleagues wrote. “Snares were not common until Vietnamese and Chinese traders from outside the area began providing local hunters with this gear.”
While increased funding helped boost ungulate populations and curb hunters, the park needed to more than double the investment of funds even during peak funding in order to keep tigers safe, according to the study.
That kind of money never happened (this is hardly unique to Laos: conservation the world over is underfunded, under-resourced, and under-prioritized).
Johnson said that while snares definitely played a role in wiping out the park’s tigers and leopards, there were other problems: poachers were rarely arrested and convicted and, over time, funding declined.
“It has been very difficult to get enough funding to adequately support patrol teams,” said Paul Eshoo, who’s worked both in ecotourism and conservation in Laos. “As donors are not willing to support day-to-day operations and patrol staff salaries directly … and instead prefer to put most of their funds into livelihood programs.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorEven without tigers and leopards, Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park remains a hugely important protected area for rare and threatened species. This was the first ever photo of Owston’s palm civet, a species listed as endangered, in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Other issues may have been more structural. For example, Laos does not have any career rangers.
According to Eshoo, patrols in Nam-Et Phou Louey were largely made up of a motley crew of government employees, volunteers, military, and villagers —but none of whom were career park rangers, a career which simply doesn’t exist in the country.
“They are changed often, and require training by the project when they arrive,” he said. Lack of expertise, experience and high turnover certainly hurt the chances of saving the park’s tigers.
“The management system in Nam Et-Phou Louey was and still remains one of the best in the country,” Eshoo added. “But, to protect a species like the tiger, which is highly threatened, requires A+ protection with a more professional and committed national parks system in the long-term.”
Investment still mattered
Conservationists, and journalists, can get blinkered by their obsession with tigers, but, in fact, even though the investment was “too late, too late” for leopards and tigers, it’s likely had a major role in maintaining other animal populations in Laos’s largest protected area.
Johnson said other species “definitely benefited” from tiger funding as her research in 2016 showed an increase in ungulates in the park. Meanwhile, many threatened Asian animals still inhabit the park, including dholes (Cuon alpinus), clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), gaur (Bos gaurus), sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), Owston’s palm civet (Chrotogale owstoni), as well as several primate and otter species.
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) once roamed the northern portion of park, but disappeared around a decade ago, though Rasphone says there was a potential footprints were found in 2015. It may be that a herd of elephants is migrating between the park and Vietnam – but conservationists just don’t know at this point.
The loss of leopards and tigers has restructured the park’s carnivore hierarchy to potentially benefit the next biggest carnivore: dholes.
Wild dogs with a badass reputation, dholes are considered endangered on the IUCN Red List, and number fewer than tigers worldwide.
“Dholes no longer have major competition for food and space, and their populations may benefit from that,” Kamler said, though he added grimly, “as long as snaring doesn’t eventually cause the extinction of this species as well.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA dhole in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. The wild dog is now the top predator of the park. It may benefit from a lack of tigers and leopards, but it faces many of the same challenges for long-term survival. This species is rarer than tigers globally and listed as endangered. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
As for the Indochinese tiger, Kamler says the conservation focus must now turn to Thailand and Myanmar.
“If these last few populations are not protected with strong law enforcement, then the entire subspecies will go extinct.”
Currently, the Indochinese tiger is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, but an update is overdue; that assessment was done in 2010. Today, it may very likely be critically endangered. In 2010, conservationists estimated 20 tigers in Cambodia (now extinct), 20 in Vietnam (also extinct), and 17 in Laos (alas, extinct). Thailand and Myanmar remain the only countries that likely house any semblance of a reproducing wild population. At the time, researchers believed there may be 352 Indochinese tigers left. If today it’s below 250, it would qualify for critically endangered status.
“All protected areas in Southeast Asia should be especially vigilant towards the snaring crises in the region,” Kamler said, adding that the region needs “strong community engagement and education programs.”
He also calls for continuous monitoring via camera trap so conservationists and staff on the ground can catch these declines quicker.
Perhaps most vital, according to the anonymous source, is to increase the importance of conservation across the Laos government. They said that Nam-Et Phou Louey was never “seriously recognized” by the three provincial governments that overlapped with the national park, and the national government, due to the decentralization of protected areas, took little note.
“Protected areas and species conservation are not a high priority for the government,” the source said. “National protected areas are not given the same level of authority or respect as other agencies. Protected area managers do not have even an official stamp and have lower authority than district authorities.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn impressive gaur is photographed in the darkness at Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. Listed as vulnerable, this species is a victim of poaching for Chinese traditional medicine as well. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
The source called on groups like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and USAID to “encourage” the Laos government to support conservation and make much-needed structural changes.
“These species and habitats can bring wealth to the country if protected,” the source said.
Hasan Rahman, a tiger expert with WCS in Bangladesh, however said a final component is essential for successful tiger conservation: “public support.”
“No amount of money, arms, ammunition, forest patrol, and law enforcement can really save any species for long period of time without public support,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t need all those, but the public ownership is the key. Not only support from the people living surrounding landscape, but also from the people of the entire region, and even the world is needed to save the most of the ‘charismatic’ species.”
Laos may have lost its tigers. But the potential for conservation there remains huge, as it does in Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area.
And it’s not impossible, with far greater protection efforts across the region, that one day tigers and leopards could find their way back to Laos — assuming we can save them from extinction in the first place.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA photo of a tiger taken on the most recent survey, meaning this was one of the last tigers in Laos before it vanished. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, and WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA sun bear, one of the park’s remaining large mammals. Photo: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA rare image of two clouded leopards. These animals are now the biggest cats in the park. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn incredible image of a tiger snarling in 2005 in the park. Probably one of the last individuals to survive there. How it perished no one knows. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Citations:
Gray, T.N.E., Hughes, A.C., Laurance, W.F. et al. The wildlife snaring crisis: an insidious and pervasive threat to biodiversity in Southeast Asia. Biodivers Conserv (2018) 27: 1031. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1450-5
Johnson, A., Goodrich, J., Hansel, T., Rasphone, A., Saypanya, S., Vongkhamheng, C., Venevongphet & Strindberg, S. 2016. To protect or neglect? Design, monitoring, and evaluation of a law enforcement strategy to recover small populations of wild tigers and their prey. Biological Conservation, 202: 99-109.
Rasphone, A., Kéry, M., Kamler, J.F., Macdonald, D.W., Documenting the demise of tiger and leopard, and the status of other carnivores and prey, in Lao PDR’s most prized protected area: Nam et – Phou louey, Global Ecology and Conservation (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00766 .

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/how-la...ts-tigers/

It is incredibly sad to see how these contries lost they tigers. In fact, I posted the page of Dr Hunter's book "Wild Cats of the World" from 2015 some time ago, and they say that most of the tiger populations in Indochina are extinct of "funtionally" extinct as there is no evidence of breeding, here is the page again:

*This image is copyright of its original author

It seems that just Thailand and Malaysia are taking a serious effort to save the Indochinese tigers.

BorneanTiger · 11-05-2019, 12:35 PM

(11-04-2019, 09:55 PM)GuateGojira Wrote:
(11-01-2019, 08:27 AM)Sully Wrote: How Laos lost its tigers
by Jeremy Hance on 28 October 2019

A new camera trap study finds that tigers vanished from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area by 2014, their last stand in Laos.

Leopards were killed off 10 years prior, making these big cats also extinct in Laos.

Scientists believe it’s most likely that the last tigers and leopards of Laos succumbed to snares, which are proliferating in astounding numbers across Southeast Asian protected areas.

The Indochinese tiger now only survives in Thailand and Myanmar, and may be on the edge of extinction.

The last tiger in Lao PDR likely died in terrible anguish. Its foot caught in a snare, the animal probably died of dehydration. Or maybe, in a desperate bid to free itself from a snare crafted from a simple and cheap motorbike cable, it tore off a leg and died from the blood loss. Perhaps the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), a distinct subspecies, was able to free itself from the snare, only to have the wound fester and kill it in the end. Or, and this isn’t impossible either, the last tiger of Lao PDR (or Laos) was simply shot to death by poachers who then butchered its body and sold its parts in the illegal trafficking trade to feed a seemingly insatiable demand for tiger bits and bones for sham medicine or status symbols.
However it died, it probably wasn’t peaceful.
A new paper in Global Conservation and Ecology finds that the last tigers of Laos vanished shortly after 2013 from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. And the scientists believe it was most likely a surge in snaring that did them in, despite large-scale investments in the park, relative to the region. With the loss of tigers in Laos’s largest protected area, the tiger is most likely extinct in Laos, as it probably is in both Cambodia and Vietnam. That’s an area significantly larger than Texas in Southeast Asia that’s now bereft of its proper top predator.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorOne of the first tiger photographed during a baseline survey. This photo is from 2003 about ten years before tigers would vanish. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
And the tiger isn’t the only victim: the researchers also believe Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri) are extinct in Laos now, wiped out from Nam Et-Phou Louey and other protected areas by the same snaring crisis.
This tragedy is simply another sign of industrial-scale “empty forest” syndrome across Southeast Asia, as poachers with guns and snares continue to wipe out animal populations, targeting anything the size of a mouse or sparrow and larger.
In the early 2000s, conservationists saw Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area as a major priority, given it still had populations of tiger, leopard and many other large mammals that had increasingly gone extinct across Southeast Asia. At the time, it was dubbed one of the most important tiger populations in the region.
In 2003 and 2004, conservationists believed there were at least seven tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey and maybe up to 23. New conservation strategies, including increased law enforcement and working with local communities, were jump started in 2005. But by 2013, researchers found only two tigers on camera trap. And no tiger has been seen since.
“This represented a sharp decline and extirpation of tigers in Nam-Et Phou Louey in only 10 years,” says lead author Akchousanh Rasphone, with the Wildlife Research Conservation Unit, known as WildCRU, at the University of Oxford.
“We’ve looked at various factors for the decline, such as prey numbers and amount of guns confiscated in the park, and the only factor that seems directly related to the tiger decline was the exponential increase in snares,” she added.
Camera traps find no tigers or leopards
Rasphone and her colleagues systematically surveyed the park from 2013 to 2017 with camera traps in what they describe as the largest endeavor of its kind ever conducted in Laos.
Their survey found no leopards at all; the last one was recorded in 2004. And the last two tigers simply vanished after 2013, denoting they were most likely killed either by snare or gun.
When asked if they could have missed tigers on the camera traps, Rasphone said, “If tigers are using an area, then typically they’re easily photographed in cameras set along trails.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn Indochinese leopard photographed in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park. Poachers wiped leopards out of the park before tigers. This animals was photographed in 2003 and was probably one of the very last leopards in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Tigers are massive, easily distinguished from other animals, tend to use well-trodden paths, and cover huge areas of territory, making photographing them far easier than many other more cryptic species on camera.
The only other place in Laos tigers were thought to maybe persist was Nakai-Nam Thuem National Biodiversity Conservation Area.
“Recent camera trapping in Nakai-Nam Thuen suggests that tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, and golden cats have now been extirpated from this protected area,” said a conservationist who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
So, tigers are very likely gone from Laos, just as they have recently been wiped out from Cambodia and Vietnam. Given all the attention and money for tigers, how did this happen?
Again.
What the #!*&*$ happened?
Jessica Hartel, the director of the Kibale Snare Removal Program in Uganda, told me in 2015 that snares are “the landmines of the forest.”
“Like landmines, snares do not discriminate, are virtually undetectable, and can cause irreversible permanent physical damage within a split second,” she said. “Like landmines, snares are unforgiving death traps that cause pain, suffering, and mutilation. Like landmines, snares are detonated automatically by way of pressure from the animals stepping into or through it.”
And big cats like tigers and leopards are “particularly vulnerable to snaring,” says Jan Kamler, co-author of the recent study also with WildCRU — even if snares are mostly set for bushmeat animals, such as deer and wild pigs.
“[Tigers and leopards] occur at relatively low densities to begin with (compared to prey species), and they have the widest ranging movements of all species,” Kamler wrote to me. “Consequently, even if snaring is stopped within a protected area, as long as snaring occurs along the boundary, then tiger and leopard populations may ultimately become extirpated.”
With only a handful of tigers left to begin with, it only takes a few encounters with snares to kill off an entire population. Ditto for leopards.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorHundreds of confiscated snares in Cambodia. These wire traps are decimating wildlife across Southeast Asia. They kill indiscriminately and cause incredible suffering to ensnared animals. Cheap and easy to make, snares are difficult for wildlife rangers to find and many parks have not adapted to this new threat. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.
Kamler theorizes that the reason leopards vanished a decade before tigers is that the presence of tigers — the apex killer in the park and known to harry other predators — forced leopards into the park’s buffer area. Here they more quickly succumbed to snares and guns that hadn’t as completely infiltrated the core area.
Research from last year in Biological Conservation found that wildlife rangers removed more than 200,000 snares from just five protected areas in Southeast Asia, including Nam-Et Phou Louey, over five years.
But Thomas Gray, the paper’s lead author and the science director for the Wildlife Alliance, told me last year that he believed even the best-trained rangers would only find a third of the snares planted in protected areas — and rangers in Nam-Et Phou Louey were not among the best, according to Gray in 2018.
“Snaring is very difficult to control because snares are cheaply made, and a single person can set hundreds and sometimes thousands of snares,” Rasphone said.
Today, millions of snares likely blanket Southeast Asia’s protected areas, indiscriminately wiping out wildlife until there is little left to kill.
‘Too little, too late’
Troy Hansel, the former Laos country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said funding and resources for Nam-Et Phou Louey came “too little too late … to secure the tiger population.”
Headed by WCS Laos, conservation groups spent between $150,000 and $200,000 annually from 2009 to 2012, according to Rasphone. The money came from international donors such as the World Bank, USFWS, and the French Development Agency (AFD). While this may sound like a lot for a developing country, the money was meant to manage a national park more than half the size of Jamaica and covered in thick forest.
Rasphone says the money definitely helped stop gun-toting poachers — gun confiscations increased with the rise of funding — but did not “stop the exponential increase in snaring.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorHunters caught on camera trap in Laos. Some hunting is allowed in the buffer zones of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. But only for particular unprotected species and under certain regulations. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
When conservation actions really took off in 2005, conservationists had the ambitious goal of increasing tiger number by 50 percent within ten years and eventually get to a point where the protected area contained 25 breeding females—turning this park into a “source site” for Indochinese tigers, according to a 2016 paper in Biological Conservation.
Lead author of that research and also a former country director of WCS Laos, Arlyne Johnson, ,says the paper was intended to evaluate the program’s success or lack of it. It records how conservationists saw the sudden rise in snaring during that decade—and how it may have been a deliberate strategy by poachers to kill off the last tigers.
“The increased snaring likely resulted from local hunters changing techniques to more effectively target tigers,” Johnson and her colleagues wrote. “Snares were not common until Vietnamese and Chinese traders from outside the area began providing local hunters with this gear.”
While increased funding helped boost ungulate populations and curb hunters, the park needed to more than double the investment of funds even during peak funding in order to keep tigers safe, according to the study.
That kind of money never happened (this is hardly unique to Laos: conservation the world over is underfunded, under-resourced, and under-prioritized).
Johnson said that while snares definitely played a role in wiping out the park’s tigers and leopards, there were other problems: poachers were rarely arrested and convicted and, over time, funding declined.
“It has been very difficult to get enough funding to adequately support patrol teams,” said Paul Eshoo, who’s worked both in ecotourism and conservation in Laos. “As donors are not willing to support day-to-day operations and patrol staff salaries directly … and instead prefer to put most of their funds into livelihood programs.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorEven without tigers and leopards, Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park remains a hugely important protected area for rare and threatened species. This was the first ever photo of Owston’s palm civet, a species listed as endangered, in Laos. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Other issues may have been more structural. For example, Laos does not have any career rangers.
According to Eshoo, patrols in Nam-Et Phou Louey were largely made up of a motley crew of government employees, volunteers, military, and villagers —but none of whom were career park rangers, a career which simply doesn’t exist in the country.
“They are changed often, and require training by the project when they arrive,” he said. Lack of expertise, experience and high turnover certainly hurt the chances of saving the park’s tigers.
“The management system in Nam Et-Phou Louey was and still remains one of the best in the country,” Eshoo added. “But, to protect a species like the tiger, which is highly threatened, requires A+ protection with a more professional and committed national parks system in the long-term.”
Investment still mattered
Conservationists, and journalists, can get blinkered by their obsession with tigers, but, in fact, even though the investment was “too late, too late” for leopards and tigers, it’s likely had a major role in maintaining other animal populations in Laos’s largest protected area.
Johnson said other species “definitely benefited” from tiger funding as her research in 2016 showed an increase in ungulates in the park. Meanwhile, many threatened Asian animals still inhabit the park, including dholes (Cuon alpinus), clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), gaur (Bos gaurus), sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), Owston’s palm civet (Chrotogale owstoni), as well as several primate and otter species.
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) once roamed the northern portion of park, but disappeared around a decade ago, though Rasphone says there was a potential footprints were found in 2015. It may be that a herd of elephants is migrating between the park and Vietnam – but conservationists just don’t know at this point.
The loss of leopards and tigers has restructured the park’s carnivore hierarchy to potentially benefit the next biggest carnivore: dholes.
Wild dogs with a badass reputation, dholes are considered endangered on the IUCN Red List, and number fewer than tigers worldwide.
“Dholes no longer have major competition for food and space, and their populations may benefit from that,” Kamler said, though he added grimly, “as long as snaring doesn’t eventually cause the extinction of this species as well.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA dhole in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. The wild dog is now the top predator of the park. It may benefit from a lack of tigers and leopards, but it faces many of the same challenges for long-term survival. This species is rarer than tigers globally and listed as endangered. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
As for the Indochinese tiger, Kamler says the conservation focus must now turn to Thailand and Myanmar.
“If these last few populations are not protected with strong law enforcement, then the entire subspecies will go extinct.”
Currently, the Indochinese tiger is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, but an update is overdue; that assessment was done in 2010. Today, it may very likely be critically endangered. In 2010, conservationists estimated 20 tigers in Cambodia (now extinct), 20 in Vietnam (also extinct), and 17 in Laos (alas, extinct). Thailand and Myanmar remain the only countries that likely house any semblance of a reproducing wild population. At the time, researchers believed there may be 352 Indochinese tigers left. If today it’s below 250, it would qualify for critically endangered status.
“All protected areas in Southeast Asia should be especially vigilant towards the snaring crises in the region,” Kamler said, adding that the region needs “strong community engagement and education programs.”
He also calls for continuous monitoring via camera trap so conservationists and staff on the ground can catch these declines quicker.
Perhaps most vital, according to the anonymous source, is to increase the importance of conservation across the Laos government. They said that Nam-Et Phou Louey was never “seriously recognized” by the three provincial governments that overlapped with the national park, and the national government, due to the decentralization of protected areas, took little note.
“Protected areas and species conservation are not a high priority for the government,” the source said. “National protected areas are not given the same level of authority or respect as other agencies. Protected area managers do not have even an official stamp and have lower authority than district authorities.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn impressive gaur is photographed in the darkness at Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. Listed as vulnerable, this species is a victim of poaching for Chinese traditional medicine as well. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
The source called on groups like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and USAID to “encourage” the Laos government to support conservation and make much-needed structural changes.
“These species and habitats can bring wealth to the country if protected,” the source said.
Hasan Rahman, a tiger expert with WCS in Bangladesh, however said a final component is essential for successful tiger conservation: “public support.”
“No amount of money, arms, ammunition, forest patrol, and law enforcement can really save any species for long period of time without public support,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t need all those, but the public ownership is the key. Not only support from the people living surrounding landscape, but also from the people of the entire region, and even the world is needed to save the most of the ‘charismatic’ species.”
Laos may have lost its tigers. But the potential for conservation there remains huge, as it does in Nam-Et Phou Louey National Protected Area.
And it’s not impossible, with far greater protection efforts across the region, that one day tigers and leopards could find their way back to Laos — assuming we can save them from extinction in the first place.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorA photo of a tiger taken on the most recent survey, meaning this was one of the last tigers in Laos before it vanished. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, and WCS-Laos.

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*This image is copyright of its original authorA sun bear, one of the park’s remaining large mammals. Photo: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

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*This image is copyright of its original authorA rare image of two clouded leopards. These animals are now the biggest cats in the park. Photo by: Akchousanh Rasphone, WildCRU, WCS-Laos.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original authorAn incredible image of a tiger snarling in 2005 in the park. Probably one of the last individuals to survive there. How it perished no one knows. Photo by: WCS-Laos.
Citations:
Gray, T.N.E., Hughes, A.C., Laurance, W.F. et al. The wildlife snaring crisis: an insidious and pervasive threat to biodiversity in Southeast Asia. Biodivers Conserv (2018) 27: 1031. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1450-5
Johnson, A., Goodrich, J., Hansel, T., Rasphone, A., Saypanya, S., Vongkhamheng, C., Venevongphet & Strindberg, S. 2016. To protect or neglect? Design, monitoring, and evaluation of a law enforcement strategy to recover small populations of wild tigers and their prey. Biological Conservation, 202: 99-109.
Rasphone, A., Kéry, M., Kamler, J.F., Macdonald, D.W., Documenting the demise of tiger and leopard, and the status of other carnivores and prey, in Lao PDR’s most prized protected area: Nam et – Phou louey, Global Ecology and Conservation (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00766 .

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/how-la...ts-tigers/

It is incredibly sad to see how these contries lost they tigers. In fact, I posted the page of Dr Hunter's book "Wild Cats of the World" from 2015 some time ago, and they say that most of the tiger populations in Indochina are extinct of "funtionally" extinct as there is no evidence of breeding, here is the page again:

*This image is copyright of its original author

It seems that just Thailand and Malaysia are taking a serious effort to save the Indochinese tigers.

A slight error in that document "Tigers are naturally absent in ... Borneo". If my namesake tiger became extinct in prehistoric times, like the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers, then it's bizarre that Bornean natives revere the tiger in a manner similar as people in places where there are still tigers, like China and India, even if that means keeping skins or teeth of tigers as souvenirs or holy artefacts: https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-tigers-...awan-japan

As it is, Asian natives today wouldn't revere the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers in the same way as they would for the Amur and Bengal tigers, would they?

GuateGojira · 11-11-2019, 07:29 PM

(11-05-2019, 12:35 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: A slight error in that document "Tigers are naturally absent in ... Borneo". If my namesake tiger became extinct in prehistoric times, like the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers, then it's bizarre that Bornean natives revere the tiger in a manner similar as people in places where there are still tigers, like China and India, even if that means keeping skins or teeth of tigers as souvenirs or holy artefacts: https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-tigers-...awan-japan

As it is, Asian natives today wouldn't revere the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers in the same way as they would for the Amur and Bengal tigers, would they?

There is no error, tigers are naturally absent in Borneo, they did not live there anymore, based on evidence. In Pleistocene times, they DO lived there but there is no evidence that they survived in "modern" times. Tigers from Ngandong, Wanhsien and Trinil were tigers that lived in Java and China, and we know that tigers still lived there in modern times and in large natural populations. It was the human that caused they extinctions in the wild. There is no difference (apart from size) between the Pleistocene tigers and Holocene tigers, based in the fossils, so there is no comparison, you say "Asian natives today wouldn't revere the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers in the same way as they would for the Amur and Bengal tigers" but that do not make sence, those names (Ngandong, Wanhsien, Amur, Bengal) are modern "man-made" names, a tiger will be a tiger for an Asian native.

Finally, the Longdan "tiger" is not a tiger per se, but a very close relative just like a cave "lion" is to a modern true lion.

BorneanTiger · 11-11-2019, 09:09 PM

(11-11-2019, 07:29 PM)GuateGojira Wrote:
(11-05-2019, 12:35 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: A slight error in that document "Tigers are naturally absent in ... Borneo". If my namesake tiger became extinct in prehistoric times, like the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers, then it's bizarre that Bornean natives revere the tiger in a manner similar as people in places where there are still tigers, like China and India, even if that means keeping skins or teeth of tigers as souvenirs or holy artefacts: https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-tigers-...awan-japan

As it is, Asian natives today wouldn't revere the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers in the same way as they would for the Amur and Bengal tigers, would they?

There is no error, tigers are naturally absent in Borneo, they did not live there anymore, based on evidence. In Pleistocene times, they DO lived there but there is no evidence that they survived in "modern" times. Tigers from Ngandong, Wanhsien and Trinil were tigers that lived in Java and China, and we know that tigers still lived there in modern times and in large natural populations. It was the human that caused they extinctions in the wild. There is no difference (apart from size) between the Pleistocene tigers and Holocene tigers, based in the fossils, so there is no comparison, you say "Asian natives today wouldn't revere the Ngandong, Wanhsien, Trinil and Longdan tigers in the same way as they would for the Amur and Bengal tigers" but that do not make sence, those names (Ngandong, Wanhsien, Amur, Bengal) are modern "man-made" names, a tiger will be a tiger for an Asian native.

Finally, the Longdan "tiger" is not a tiger per se, but a very close relative just like a cave "lion" is to a modern true lion.

What I meant was that Bornean natives revere the tiger in a similar way as say people in Western and Central Asia (where the Caspian tiger occurred) revere the tiger, as if the Bornean tiger was an animal that occurred recently, like the Caspian tiger. The Caspian tiger lives on the art and literature of Western and Central Asia, and likewise, the Bornean tiger is ritually revered by Bornean natives, as pointed out by myself and Phatio earlier. To quote Wijaya of Mongabay: https://news.mongabay.com/2016/11/was-bo...of-tigers/

"One recent morning I paid a visit to Iber Djamal, a leader of the Dayak Ngaju indigenous people. He had invited us to see his mandau, a traditional Dayak weapon. When I saw the mandau, which is a kind of machete, my attention focused not on the blade but on the fangs adorning it. What surprised me was that they were said to be tiger fangs. “These are tiger fangs, not leopard fangs,” Iber said. “The fangs that decorate this mandau are from the animals that have been killed by the weapons inherited from my ancestors. Besides tigers, there are crocodiles, bears, leopards and boars.”

“What kind of tiger was killed with this mandau?”

“A tiger in Kalimantan. It was killed by my ancestor. There used to be tigers in Kalimantan.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

Iber Djamal shows off the tiger fangs on his mandau. Photo by Jemmie Delvian

Iber’s explanation certainly differs from the general understanding about tigers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island. Iber said that the tiger — called harimau in Indonesian and haramaung in Dayak Ngaju — was one of the animals most commonly hunted by his ancestors.
“We believe that if a man can hunt and kill a tiger when his wife is pregnant, the child will grow up to be a king or a leader,” he said. If a mandau is adorned with tiger fangs, it will endow whomever wields it with courage. “Maybe because they’re worth so much to some people, tigers in Kalimantan have been hunted to extinction,” he said. He added that if anyone in his tribe ever found a tiger, it wouldn’t be hunted, “because these animals need to be protected.”"

The Caspian tiger featured on Azerbaijani stamps: http://www.azermarka.az/en/1994.php?suba...cat=10&

*This image is copyright of its original author

By contrast, we only know of the prehistoric Ngandong, Wanhsien and Trinil tigers and the Longdan 'tigrine' cat from fossils, and it was only after the discovery of their fossils that they have come to dominate the imagination of people, whereas the memory of the Bornean and Caspian tigers have been kept alive, even without having to dig up fossils, so it appears that the Bornean tiger was an animal that occurred recently, like its Caspian, Javan and Balinese relatives, and that the reason for its extinction was the same as that of those tigers: persecution by humans.

What @phatio posted earlier which IMO destroys the likelihood that the Bornean tiger became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene (we don't have skins of the Ngandong, Wanhsien and Trinil tigers and Longdan tigrine cat, at least none that we know of, unless say a frozen Wanhsien tiger is discovered, like for those Upper Pleistocene Eurasian cave lion cubs): https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-on-the-...s?page=146

(04-10-2019, 02:56 PM)phatio Wrote: Was Borneo once a land of tigers?

The scientific consensus is that while tigers did inhabit the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, and still live in Sumatra, they never lived in Borneo.
Indigenous peoples in Borneo say otherwise. So-called ‘tiger fangs,’ for example, often feature in traditional Dayak ceremonies.
Some researchers wonder if the question of whether tigers lived in Borneo has gotten short shrift from experts who should be paying more attention to local communities.

PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia — One recent morning I paid a visit to Iber Djamal, a leader of the Dayak Ngaju indigenous people. He had invited us to see his mandau, a traditional Dayak weapon.

When I saw the mandau, which is a kind of machete, my attention focused not on the blade but on the fangs adorning it. What surprised me was that they were said to be tiger fangs.

“These are tiger fangs, not leopard fangs,” Iber said. “The fangs that decorate this mandau are from the animals that have been killed by the weapons inherited from my ancestors. Besides tigers, there are crocodiles, bears, leopards and boars.” What kind of tiger was killed with this mandau?

“A tiger in Kalimantan. It was killed by my ancestor. There used to be tigers in Kalimantan.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

Iber Djamal shows off the tiger fangs on his mandau. Photo by Jemmie Delvian

Iber’s explanation certainly differs from the general understanding about tigers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island. The present scientific consensus is that no one in Kalimantan has ever found a tiger. Researchers think the only tigers in Indonesia are in Bali (now extinct), Java (thought to be extinct) and Sumatra (only a few hundred left).

Iber said that the tiger — called harimau in Indonesian and haramaung in Dayak Ngaju — was one of the animals most commonly hunted by his ancestors. “We believe that if a man can hunt and kill a tiger when his wife is pregnant, the child will grow up to be a king or a leader,” he said. If a mandau is adorned with tiger fangs, it will endow whomever wields it with courage.

“Maybe because they’re worth so much to some people, tigers in Kalimantan have been hunted to extinction,” he said. He added that if anyone in his tribe ever found a tiger, it wouldn’t be hunted, “because these animals need to be protected.”

*This image is copyright of its original author

Fangs from a tiger or a clouded leopard?

After encountering this phenomenon, I contacted Yoan Dinata, chairperson of Forum HarimauKita, an NGO, about the possibility of a long-lost species of Bornean tiger. “There is no record or scholarship of tigers ever living in Kalimantan,” Dinata said. “But there is a possibility that in the past they did live there, because the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo were once fused with mainland Southeast Asia.”

According to Dinata, in Kalimantan today there is only the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi). “I don’t know if the fangs adorning all of those mandau blades are the fangs of tigers or clouded leopards,” he said. Dinata suggested that there should be more research as to the origin of the fangs. “If they really are tiger fangs, we should study how old they are.”

Scientifically, the nonexistence of tigers in Kalimantan raises many questions among researchers. The merging in ancient times of Borneo with mainland Southeast Asia certainly brought to it a variety of Asiatic wildlife. As a predator, the path of the tiger in the past was certainly influenced by the distribution of its prey. From a habitat perspective the characterstics of Sumatra today are similar with those of Kalimantan.

“Almost all of the animals in Kalimantan are also in Sumatra, including the orangutan and elephant. But surprisingly in Kalimantan today there aren’t any tigers,” Dinata said. “Dayak people’s recognition of the existence of tigers in the past would be an interesting thing to study.”

On the other hand, many of the sources of scientific findings in the past century are by Western researchers — it’s very rare to get information from local communities to be summarized in the scientific record. For example, findings that the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) might exist in Kalimantan were questioned by some researchers. Only after evidence such as horns and tracks were found did experts begin to seriously explore the existence of this species. As a result, experts finally met the Sumatran rhino in Borneo.

Maybe at a historical moment the tracks of a Bornean tiger will be revealed based on information from local communities. Who knows?
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/11/was-bo...of-tigers/
by Taufik Wijaya on 7 November 2016 | Translated by Philip Jacobson

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Recently I came across an article about Bornean Tiger written by a local bornean guy. very interesting but of course it's in indonesian, you can use translate if you want to read the whole story.
https://folksofdayak.wordpress.com/2018/...tau-fakta/
it is said there were/are tigers in Borneo. The indigenous peoples of Borneo, commonly known as Dayak called the big cat "Haramaong, Remaong, Lencau" etc. and they know the larger striped cat is different from smaller clouded leopard which they called "Kule".
according to the writter, he/she has some Bornean tiger's canines which is much larger than their Sumatran's cousin. unfortunately he/she dind't post the comparison picture. The Dayak people also made "Besunung", one of their traditional clothes from real Bornean tiger skins.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

@GrizzlyClaw and @tigerluver i need your help once again to determine the originality of these allegedly Bornean tiger canines.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

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let say if these canines and skins were real, some people suggest they probably got those stuff from trading with sumatran, javan or malayan people where tigers existed there. but i highly doubt that, as the indigenous peoples of Borneo are forest dweller peoples. They live completely from their jungle, their home, the only resources they knew for so long. until fairly recently these people hardly knew about money, let alone trading with foreign people.

Here's some sighting reports from my quick search. May 2017
https://www.borneonews.co.id/berita/6344...da-harimau
witness insisted they saw a tiger not a clouded leopard because the animal is larger and longer, and it's a striped cat not spotted. the animal's skin is as clean and soft as carpet, they added.

from March 2018
https://www.indopos.co.id/read/2018/03/0...uk-sekolah

*This image is copyright of its original author

the authority checking animals pugmark

Interestingly, all of the story above coming from the same area, more or less around the yellow circle in the map below

*This image is copyright of its original author

what do you think guys? is this false alarm or have we been missing something here?

another interesting read
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...cal_record
https://www.researchgate.net/publication..._existence

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