Tiger's last hope

Can a four-day forum, aimed at saving the world's biggest cat from extinction, make a difference?

There are now more tigers living in US zoos - 5000 at the Worldwide Fund for Nature's last count in 2008 - than in the wild, and it seems only a miracle can save these charismatic animals. Could the International Tiger Forum, which Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opens in St Petersburg today, be the turning point the tiger needs to keep from going the way of the dodo?

This, incidentally, is the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which comes round every 12 years - but today there are only 3500 of the biggest of the big cats stealing through Asia's mangroves, grasslands and forests, vaporised as they are by the wants and needs of the four billion people who live on the continent, by their desire for more space to live, more resources to protect and more tigers to dismember for the precious fur and body parts they yield.

A Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) report released this month shows that parts of more than 1000 tigers destined for the medicinal trade were confiscated in 11of the tiger's 13 range countries over the past decade. "With parts of potentially more than 100 tigers actually seized each year," says report author Pauline Verheij, "one can only speculate on the true numbers of animals being plundered."

But Li Quan, a Gucci executive turned conservationist, adds a lateral perspective to the medicinal trade in tiger parts.

"Many claim that the trade impacts heavily on tiger numbers. But there's another school of thought that says a ban on the trade is actually adversely affecting wild tigers," says Quan, who in 2003 founded a rewilding project at the Laohu Valley Reserve near Philippolis in the Free State to teach zoo-born tigers from China how to live and hunt in the wilderness. Ultimately, she hopes that the animals, all of which are South China tigers, will return to a Chinese reserve.

"Trading in tiger parts carries the death penalty in China, but it's like a drug - when you ban it, people want more and there will always be a small percentage of people who are going to want to take that risk."

The real obstacle to keeping tigers in their native habitat, Quan believes, is human development: "In the last 100 years tigers have fallen by 90% and their habitat has decreased by 93%. So while poaching is a problem, it's human encroachment we really need to worry about."

Critically endangered species have been rescued before. At the end of the 19th century, southern Africa's white rhino was down to just 20animals in KwaZulu-Natal, but by 2007 extraordinary conservation efforts in South Africa had turbo-charged the population to around 16000 individuals.

The problem with Asia is that there's virtually nowhere for such animals to go, which is why Quan, supported by her investment banker husband, Stuart Bray, personally funded the relocation of the tigers to South Africa, a country renowned for its game-management expertise and the space in which to apply it. Quan's work, however, has courted much criticism for setting a precedent for other alien species to be brought into South Africa.

"We're actually not introducing tigers to South Africa - they're kept in enclosures," she argues. "The reserve spans 33000ha and fewer than 200ha are dedicated to the rewilding project; and we've restocked the reserve with indigenous game, such as blesbuck, which we use to train the tigers to hunt.

"Blesbuck (are) incredibly fast, so if the tigers can kill such a high-speed animal, they can make successful kills anywhere."

As it is, the South China tiger is down from 4000 animals in the 1950s to zero in the wild, so Quan's project - whose tiger enclave has grown from five to nine animals since their temporary relocation to South Africa - is the best shot one of the most threatened beasts in the world has. So far, three potential sites for the tigers' reintroduction to China have been identified. The Chinese government, says Quan, will announce the final site - a fenced-off nature reserve in southern China - at the International Tiger Forum.

"The tigers don't belong to me. They belong to China, and we're hoping to send some of them back next year. To test the waters, we'll probably only reintroduce two at first. In the meantime, we're drawing heavily on the South African conservation model to manage the Chinese reserve and train people on-site."

But what about the four-day forum, which has attracted 400 of the world's top big-cat specialists and heads of state from several tiger-range countries? Will this last-ditch impetus give the tiger its future back? Forum delegate Dr Barney Long, the WWF's tiger programme manager, is buoyant.

"Obviously summits have their limitations, but already the climate for tiger conservation has changed quite dramatically," he says. "Many of the countries have made huge commitments to implement new policies, set up mechanisms to address poaching and trafficking; there's been new protected areas established and more money put in.

Even if we can't get the political will that is required, we can at least go a large step to getting there, setting up the foundations for recovery across the tiger's entire range."

Three of the tiger's nine subspecies - the Bali, Javan and Caspian tiger - were wiped off the record during the 20th century. The South China tiger, the so-called parent species from which all tiger subspecies stem, is already functionally extinct in the wild.

If Long's optimism is misplaced, the iconic beast that inspired some of William Blake's finest poetry might be nothing but a cultural construct when the next Chinese Year of the Tiger rolls around.

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