Tigers in zoos. Tigers in circuses. Tigers in private homes. Tigers in tiger farms. Tigers for amusement. Tigers for worship. Tigers for status. Tigers for bones. There are more tigers in captivity serving human needs than in the wild—WWF estimates twice as many.
But what about tigers for their own sakes, those magnificent felids stalking through the sal forests of India after a gaur? These are the tigers that Ullas Karanth has spent his life working to save and this is the story of the author's life with, and for, tigers. Starting with a passion for nature but no formal training, Karanth taught himself much about nature through exploring his native Karnataka state in south-western India, always convinced that his life's work was to save tigers.
After several career changes, Karanth received a PhD from the University of Florida. During his studies, he conducted path-breaking work on radio-collared individual tigers and leopards in Nagarahole National Park in Karnataka. There, he endured intense days in the field tracking the cats, and painstakingly assembled his findings into an understanding of how tigers and leopards lived within the landscape, what they ate, how fights rearranged their social structures, and what happened when cubs dispersed and set up new territories. His detailed work revealed a fact that is critical for tiger conservation: female tigers can breed successfully and rapidly if given sufficient food—wild cattle, deer and boar in large numbers—and left to live in settings with few people or domestic animals.
Karanth's observations not only provided vital information on tigers, but his long-term field presence also allowed him to build on the strong Indian tradition of lay people's interest in natural history. He recruited and trained a cadre of citizen scientists to conduct line transect surveys, collect scats and perform other time-consuming work. This group of trained and dedicated people served as a strong and diverse base of supporters who would be critical in future fieldwork and advocacy when the troubles began.
Tiger deaths in Nagarhole Park, where he was working, appear to have been the turning point for Karanth, when he went from being a tiger biologist to becoming a tiger conservationist. A coincidental series of five tiger deaths in 1990 led to the rumour that it was Karanth's research methods that were responsible. Fanned by the tabloid press, these deaths reverberated across India and brought down on the research project the larger national controversies regarding forest exploitation, forest dwellers and miners, and the multi-level rough-and-tumble politics of India.
At this point the book pivots from the dreamy, familiar prose of a hard-working field biologist tirelessly following fascinating animals, into a passionate, detailed examination of the political ecology of tiger conservation in India, with the author's work at its core. This is a tale of deep frustration featuring tigers killing people, the burning of Karanth's research camp, self-serving politicians, swirling local to national politics, the tabloid press and its lack of interest in the facts of tiger conservation, and the rent-seeking and self-aggrandizement of individuals, government agencies, and social and non-governmental organizations. It is also the story of a country changing from highly rural to increasingly urban with improved economic circumstances, and the evolving social view of tigers and tiger conservation that came with this transition.
This tale is told blow by blow, person by person (with those who impeded Karanth's work named only with initials), incident by incident, political interference by political interference, and lost opportunity by lost opportunity. The author has a long memory and has faced a panoply of impediments woven in and around the kaleidoscope of Indian politics. He has particular scorn for what he calls ‘forest bureaucrats’, and those who feed off large international projects while not actually helping tigers.
To Karanth, any hope of long-term tiger survival requires an understanding that people and tigers can coexist at the scale of a country or state, but not at the scale of a single protected area. This means that for tigers to thrive, people living within protected areas need to voluntarily relocate—a topic that was anathema to many but not to Karanth, who worked with many parties to find land and resources to initiate the gargantuan task of voluntary resettlement of forest-dwelling peoples in protected areas in south-western India. This intervention comes with high political and social costs, but Karanth maintains it is the only fair solution to help forest-dwelling peoples with limited access to governmental services, and to allow tigers to live their tiger lives. Supporting his argument, Karanth presents evidence of this dual benefit from the limited voluntary resettlement project he was able to help initiate before this effort was largely shut down by opponents.
Realizing that tiger conservation requires a broader perspective than work in a single protected area, Karanth shifted his research from individual tigers to populations. In particular, he pursued transparent and statistically robust means of determining changes in tiger population size. Even readers with limited interest in tigers will know that much is made of press releases issued by conservation organizations and governments about increasing tiger numbers. The end of the book, however, contains a scorching critique of the Indian government for ignoring, diluting and replacing the peer-reviewed methods that Karanth and colleagues have developed with the government's sloppy, opaque methods, based on data that are kept secret. The result is, as Karanth argues, a complete lack of confidence in the Indian government's numbers of tigers, which in turn results in a lack of ability to determine which conservation methods are effective and which are not.
The author ends the book reminding us that India is the country with the most tigers and the greatest potential to increase and maintain the number of these magnificent creatures in the wild. Despite the problems and setbacks, India remains the wild tiger's best hope. Karanth argues that realizing this potential will require attention to creating and increasing tiger source populations that are connected across the country. It will also require social support built on sustainable tiger tourism, and finally, dismantling of the government bureaucracy that has ‘smothered’ tiger conservation (p. 221).
Decades of service at the frontline of tiger conservation in India have forged Ullas Karanth into one of the world's premier tiger biologists. The major value of this book is the telling of his story and its potential as a teaching tool that lays out in great detail the real politics of conservation of large animals that can be in conflict with humans. Much of the literature that is used to teach students about conservation comprises scientifically sanitized technical papers and reports that fail to convey Karanth's reality of death, birth, mobs, graft, vendettas and the sort of noble stubbornness that characterizes his life's work. This is a grand story, well told. Despite being deeply pessimistic in many parts, the book ends with a passionate conviction that tigers can survive and that India will be the key player ensuring that survival. Tigers stalking through grasslands, the light glinting off their rippling striped coats, won't know the work of Karanth, but those of us who want to live in a world rich with tigers have much to thank him for.
Open access
