Spotlight on Zoo Science
January 10, 2005
Tigers in the Land of Dragons
The people of Bhutan historically called their country Druk Yul—the land of the thunder dragon. In the future, we might well call this little-known country ‘land of the tiger’, as Zoo scientists help Bhutan chart a conservation course to ensure that tigers live on in reality, not myth.
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| Jon Ballou (left) and John Seidensticker after the formal opening of the meeting. Seidensticker donned traditional Bhutanese men's wear for the occasion. |
In September 2004, National Zoo scientists John Seidensticker and Jon Ballou, and FONZ communications director Susan Lumpkin, as well as several Zoo research associates, participated in an international meeting to lay the groundwork for a new Tiger Action Plan for the Kingdom of Bhutan. The plan, now in draft form, will guide this Asian country’s efforts to conserve its tigers in the next ten years, from 2005 through 2015.
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| Forest still covers much of Bhutan's land. |
Nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, Bhutan is a small country with an area of about 18,000 square miles—roughly the size of Switzerland—with more than 70 percent of that area still under forest cover. Maintaining these forest ecosystems intact into the future, however, will require attention and careful planning, such as that begun at this tiger meeting.
With habitats ranging from tropical lowlands to alpine meadows, Bhutan harbors an immense diversity of plants and animals, including an estimated 115 to 150 Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris). Tigers are found throughout the country—a tiger has even been photographed at nearly 13,500 feet elevation—and about a quarter of land area is potential tiger habitat. The goal of the new plan is to maintain Bhutan’s tigers as one, interconnected breeding population that exists on wild prey with minimal conflict between people and tigers.
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| Tiger's Nest Monastery. |
The meeting was held in Paro, appropriately near Bhutan’s landmark Tiger’s Nest Monastery. In the eighth century, it is said, Guru Rinpoche rode a flying tiger to this now-sacred site and thus brought Buddhism to Bhutan. That the Bhutanese people revere the tiger as a protector of the nation’s official religion contributes to the tiger’s relatively bright prospects for survival there. So does the country’s small population of fewer than a million people living at low density. But there are other reasons as well for this optimistic outlook on the future of tigers and all wildlife in Bhutan.
Increasing Happiness
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| Preservation of Bhutan's beautiful natural environment is a government priority. |
With a reverence rarely accorded to modern political leaders, the Bhutanese tell you that tigers survive in Bhutan thanks to enlightened government. Equally rarely, this is true. Bhutan’s government is referred to as a democratic monarchy. It is presided over by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who in the late 1980s introduced the revolutionary notion that increasing “Gross National Happiness” not “Gross National Product” should be the goal of development.
A healthy environment for people and wildlife is considered an important component of happiness. Thus, preservation of the environment is a guiding principle in Bhutan’s pursuit of the “middle path” to economic development—the country’s leaders are striving to move the country from an essentially pre-modern undeveloped society directly to a post-modern sustainable one.
Tigers are fully protected under Bhutanese legislation. More than a quarter of the country’s land area is protected in national parks, five of which support tigers. Equally important, tigers live and breed outside of protected areas, and Bhutan, as a “Gift to the Earth” in 1999, has established protected “biological corridors” to link these protected areas. Thus, the groundwork is laid for maintaining Bhutan’s tigers as an interconnected breeding population. Further, Bhutan’s protected areas are linked to reserves in India that also support tigers, thus creating one of the largest remaining tiger landscapes. How to maintain this habitat connectivity is a central component of the tiger action plan drafted at the meeting.
Challenges
Bhutan is unique among Asia’s tiger range states in that its baseline for tiger conservation is fairly high: Conservation programs are addressing ways to maintain what is a pretty good situation for tigers rather than struggling to salvage remnant populations in already degraded habitats. Bhutan’s challenges, which the new plan is designed to address, nonetheless remain formidable.
People and Pigs
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| Most Bhutanese are poor rural farmers and herders. |
Nearly 80 percent of the Bhutanese people are subsistence farmers and herders. The traditional system of livestock management is to let cattle and yaks graze freely in the forest, with little or no guarding. (One disadvantage of a small population is a shortage of labor.) Free-ranging livestock are very attractive prey for the tigers living in those same forests, especially where wild deer, pigs, and other prey may be scarce or the difficult terrain makes hunting wild prey harder than snatching a cow.
Justifiable anger at the loss of their valuable livestock leads some people to kill tigers in retaliation. People lace livestock carcasses with poison and leave them for the tigers to eat. Although this is illegal, such crimes are difficult to detect in Bhutan’s remote rural areas. Moreover, conservationists wish to foster good relations with tigers’ human neighbors so as to engender support for tiger conservation. To this end, Bhutan has begun an ambitious compensation scheme to reimburse people a portion of the value of livestock lost to tigers and other predators, such as snow leopards and Himalayan black bears.
The flip side of compensation for losses is incentive for preventing them in the first place. As part of the proposed new ten-year plan, Bhutan’s conservation department hopes to explore ways to promote better husbandry practices, such as stall feeding of cattle, that help take livestock out of harm’s way.
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| Bhutan's population is small but growing, and many rural people, including children, are illiterate. |
Education is another key element of the plan. Many of Bhutan’s rural people are illiterate, and while most respect the tiger as a cultural emblem, few understand its role in the ecosystem. Along with livestock depredation by predators, crop damage perpetrated primarily by wild pigs is a serious problem for rural farmers. Killing tigers, which prey on wild pigs and thus keep their numbers down, may solve one problem for rural people by reducing livestock losses and simultaneously exacerbate the other problem of crop damage by wild pigs.
Roadless and Remote
Much of the habitat occupied by tigers in Bhutan is rugged and hard to get to. Fewer than 2,500 miles of roads crisscross Bhutan, not all of them paved. (For comparison, Switzerland has more than 44,000 miles of roads, all paved.) This means that most Bhutanese villagers must walk about half a day along mule trails to reach a vehicle road, and some are several days’ walk from the nearest road. This inaccessibility, combined with the tiger’s low density, reduces the amount of commercial poaching of tigers for their pelts and other products there.
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| It takes six to seven hours to walk to this village in a roadless area of Bhutan. |
On the other hand, Bhutan has porous borders with India and China, where there are lucrative markets for tiger parts, and some poaching occurs. At present, Bhutan has too few people trained to detect poachers, and no legislation empowers its law enforcement agencies to arrest and prosecute foreign traders. One goal of the new plan is to address this deficiency and to begin dialogs with China and India about working jointly to curb the cross-border trade.
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| Bhutan's fast-moving rivers are harnessed for electricity. |
The lack of roads, while a boon to conservation, hampers Bhutan’s economic development, and plans are in place to expand the country’s road system. Road construction and other development activities, such as installation of power transmission lines for rural electrification and export (Bhutan’s largest single source of income is selling hydroelectric power to India), threatens to fragment tiger habitat in the future. Finding ways to identify and mitigate potentially adverse effects of these activities on tigers is a key goal of the plan, and will require close cooperation between a multitude of governmental and private organizations.
Knowledge is Power
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| Little is known about tigers in Bhutan. |
The current status of Bhutan’s tiger population is unknown. The last nationwide survey was conducted in 1998, yielding an estimate of 67 to 81 breeding individuals (or 115 to 150 total animals including juveniles), but there is no information on whether the population has since increased, decreased, or stayed about the same.
Moreover, there is little understanding of the ecology of tigers living in Bhutan’s mountain habitats, the distribution and ecology of prey species, or the relationships between tigers and their prey. Neither has the genetic diversity of the tiger population, which is key to its long-term viability, been studied. Research proposed in the draft plan, along with a permanent monitoring scheme to be put in place, will address all of these questions.
Finally, the draft plan outlines a series of actions to address one of Bhutan’s most pressing problems. There is a severe shortage of trained people carry out tiger conservation—to conduct surveys, research, and monitoring; to implement education and outreach programs; and to manage protected areas. Among the proposed actions are inviting the National Zoo’s Wildlife Conservation and Management Training Program staff to conduct training programs in Bhutan, and sending Bhutanese biologists to the Zoo to receive training in genetics.
Bhutan is committed to securing the tiger’s future. This new plan promises to help it succeed.
—Susan Lumpkin, John Seidensticker, and Jon Ballou
The 2004 international meeting was coordinated by WWF Bhutan and its government partner, the Nature Conservation Division of the Department of Forests. It was funded by the Save The Tiger Fund, whose council is chaired by John Seidensticker.
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