India's tigers in losing battle against poachers

By Aussiegirl

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, 1757–1827

Print Story: FEATURE - India's tigers in losing battle against poachers on Yahoo! News

By Krittivas Mukherjee

On a routine patrol of a vast jungle in the central highlands in April, forest guards came across a gruesome scene.

Flies swarmed beside thick undergrowth where a tiger lay dead: together with maggots, they had reduced the animal's once-magnificent, gold-and-black striped body to a putrid, hollowed carcass.

"Poachers poisoned the tiger but could not carry it away," said Khageshwar Nayak, chief of Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, which was made famous in the jungle tales of Rudyard Kipling.

After three decades of serving the Indian Forest Service, Nayak has concluded that the killing of tigers is unstoppable. [....]

Conservationists say that India, which has about half of the world's surviving tigers, is losing a battle to save the big cats.

"Poaching is the main reason why we are losing the tiger. At the current rate, we could lose them all in 20-50 years," said Rahul Kaul, director of the Wildlife Trust of India.

About a century ago, there were some 40,000 tigers in India. But decades of hunting by the boisterous sons of innumerable royalties and poaching have cut their number to some 3,700 today. Some conservationists say the population could be under 2,000. [....]

Poachers and smugglers of both tigers and elephants exploit the grinding poverty of forest villagers to keep them on their side. Authorities have tried educating the villagers, handing out monetary incentives and drafting them as informants, but to little avail.

Officials say the preferred weapon of poachers is a deadly cocktail of cheap chemicals and pesticides which is left in chunks of beef on a tiger's path. Poachers then return at night, skin the animal, chop it up and carry the pieces away in bags.

A few years ago, electrocution was more common: high-voltage powerlines connected to a wire-trip on the ground did the job. [....]

Indian authorities say saving the tiger is almost impossible without the help of China, the biggest market for big cat parts that are used in traditional Chinese medicines.

"China's help is vital. There is no market for tiger parts in India. But across the border there is a great demand. They can help by curbing that market," Rajesh Gopal, head of the state-run conservation agency Project Tiger, told Reuters in a recent interview.

Tiger parts such as bones and penises are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and a single tiger can fetch up to $50,000 in the international market.

Conservationists say there has been a sharp rise in the poaching of tigers and leopards in India in recent years to feed an explosion of demand from Tibet, where an ancient tradition of wearing animal furs seemed to have been revived, partly perhaps as a result of greater disposable income.

India and China signed an agreement in 1995 to help conserve the tiger but experts say it has been of little help. [...]

But Nayak says laws alone can not save the tigers.

"The main problem is the illicit trade. If that can not be checked whatever measure you take will be futile."