A lone predator and the most impressive and elusive of the big cats, the tiger is now on the brink of extinction, writes Eileen Battersby.
Beautiful, terrifying, graceful and secretive, the tiger, the largest of the big cats, is an elusive, rather than furtive, creature. Among wild animals, even among the other big cats, it has immense presence. It also possesses the surreal allure of a bright, reddish orange coat with dramatic black stripes and wonderful mask-like faces.
Its warpaint-like facial markings above the eye area are as individual as human fingerprints. There are also the large bright, clear, rather human-looking eyes, ranging in colour from bronze to tawny yellow to light green. Armed with lethal claws extending more than two inches in length and massive paws larger than horse's hooves, the tiger is seen as a god, a menace and a mystery - and effortlessly fulfils all of these roles.
International wildlife has entered the sitting room courtesy of television. But a real-life viewing is different. Most of us will only see tigers in captivity, in a zoo or, sadder still, in a circus, reduced to performing silly tricks. There is little chance of a sighting in a natural habitat. The luckier amongst us might catch a glimpse of one in an Asian nature preserve or in a national park, as a shadow under a tree, a slight movement in the grass, or possibly observe one at close quarters from the relative safety of an elephant's back. Few tigers would contemplate translating an elephant into meal, not when smaller prey, such as deer or wild pigs, is available.
Far more solitary than the lion, for whom hunting with the pride or family group is a team effort, the tiger is, in common with all other cats, a lone predator. Even the nursing tigress with cubs to feed might spend almost a day hunting on her own.
It takes a lot of meat to sustain an adult tiger - between 13 lbs and 16 lbs a day- and with cubs to support, even more. A good kill must be secured at least every three days. In addition to making the kill there is also the effort of protecting cubs from other predators. Less than three tiger cubs in 20 survive to adulthood.
But back to enforced domesticity, and breeding in captivity is neither easy nor successful. Though safe and protected, the zoo tiger usually looks sullen and bored. Food, it seems, comes too easily to the protected, with feeding time as regular as clockwork and far removed from the struggle for prey in the wild. This most skilled of hunters appears arrogantly indifferent to the people standing outside the enclosures. Only occasionally will a tiger bother baring its teeth at passive human onlookers.
Still, it does not enjoy being on view. Tigers don't play to the gallery. Turlough, the six-year-old male Siberian or Amur, who lives in Dublin Zoo, has a 600-metre enclosure complete with trees, pole and pool. He is an example of how the majority of Amur tigers now live - in captivity. The wild is a shrinking habitat. Tigers don't roam idly, they are too busy finding food, doggedly working a carefully delineated territory, always on the lookout for the next meal - and equally on the alert for any rival predators.
We love the drama and glamour of the tiger, its rich place in Chinese and Indian mythology, with its images, Vaghadeva, the tiger god, "Guardian of the Forest", and the goddess Durga who, bearing light and peace, rides upon a tiger. For most of us, the tiger, along with the elephant, the lion, the giraffe and the zebra, represents our most immediate image of the wild animal. Just as the lion is the king of the African jungle, the tiger is the great animal of Asia. Even Indian culture, with its reverence for the sacred cow, sustains a special place for the tiger. Yet in common with the panda, the mighty tiger is yet another endangered species.
Of the eight tiger subspecies, three began to disappear in the 1940s and are now extinct: the Bali tiger vanished from its natural habitat, the island of Bali, about 50 years ago; the Javan tiger, native of Indonesia, became extinct in the last 25 to 30 years, while the Caspian tiger, which once ranged throughout a vast area of Afghanistan, Iran, Mongolia, Turkey and central Asiatic Russia, has also been lost forever.
This leaves five surviving - if endangered - subspecies. The magnificent Siberian or Amur tiger, of which most of the surviving 400 now live in eastern Siberia, is the largest, weighing in at up to 600 lbs. Its vulnerability in the new Russia, with its loss of natural habitat and the threat from poaching, has instigated international conservation projects.
The Bengal or Indian tiger is the largest surviving subspecies population at between 3,000 and 5,000, and is found in India, Bangladesh and Bhutan, as well as China, Burma and Nepal. The Indochinese tiger, numbering between 1,000 and 1,800, is found in Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The Sumatran tiger has a population of about 500 on the island of Sumatra (with two residing at Dublin Zoo). Meanwhile, the South Chinese or Amoy tiger is facing extinction, with just 30 to 80 still ranging central and eastern China.
Admittedly, vulnerable is not a word that immediately comes to mind when considering the tiger. But think again. Look at the old photographs from the days of the British Raj. The colonials quickly adopted the nawab's pastime of hunting tigers. The skins and mounted heads were displayed as trophies. But far removed from killing tigers as game were the commercial aspects of selling skins as exotic furnishings or coats, while the body parts had others uses, aside from meat.
For more than 1,000 years - and perhaps for as long as 4,000 years - pulverised tiger bone, organs and other body parts have been used in traditional Chinese medicine and aphrodisiacs, including tiger penis soup, an aid for male potency. In a report published in National Geographic in December 1997, reference was made to a campaign against the eating of tigers in Taiwan, where slain tigers were publicly butchered in street markets. It also mentioned that the selling of tiger parts is illegal in the US, yet a survey at that time revealed that dozens of products advertised as containing tiger bone were openly available in five US cities.
There are many stories featuring man- eating tigers, but most big cats attack humans only in the absence of prey. In cases where tigers have been killed as a result of attacks made on villages, the villagers themselves have often asked the gods and the tigers themselves for forgiveness.
There are the attractive myths, and there are the facts - some of which are equally difficult to prove. It is generally held that the tiger evolved in what is now southern China more than a million years ago. It then moved west towards the Caspian Sea. Northwards, its passage brought it to the great snow fields of Siberia that also offered vast forests. And to the south, across Indochina and Indonesia, to Bali. The majority of tigers still living in the wild are found in India, truly the Land of the Tiger, as well as in neighbouring Bangladesh and Nepal. While the tiger has always been under pressure in China as a bountied pest and commodity, in India, with that long history of being killed for sport by the wealthy, shooting tigers was banned in 1970.
This ban came about partly through the emergence of the international Save the Tiger project. In 1973, the then Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, initiated Project Tiger, setting aside nine national parks offering special protection. By 1997, a further 14 parks had been designated, with an extra nine by 2000. However, for all the early success of the scheme (the number of India's tigers had doubled to more than 4,000 in 1984), disaster struck the same year with Gandhi's assassination. Indian wildlife lost a protector and at the same time an increasing human population brought more pressure on habitat and forestry as the need for farmland heightened. Another threat was the expanding Chinese demand for tiger bones and body parts as tigers in China became more rare. Between 1990 and 1993, 1,500 Indian tigers were killed by poachers.
Loss of habitat, increased logging and poaching were also endangering the shrinking population of Siberian or Amur tigers. US wildlife biologist Maurice Hornocker arrived in Russia in 1990 determined to establish a US/Russian programme to save the Siberian tiger from extinction. He invited American naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen to visit the Siberian Tiger Project, based in a remote landscape of incredible beauty. Matthiessen, author of classics such as The Snow Leopard (1978) and African Silences (1991), first visited in 1992 and again in 1995. Tigers in the Snow, his account of the project, is interspersed with a look at the evolution, history, daily life and plight of tigers in general. It conveys the passion of the enthusiast determined to see a tiger in the wild.
"I began to fear that luck was not with us and we would see no tigers," Matthiessen writes. "The plane banked south and west, leaving the reserve. Dale picked up a signal. Crisscrossing the valley, it made a wide turn over a logging track, and there I saw the first wild tiger of my life, bounding across the wide expanse in bursts of powder. With the low winter sun glancing off the snow, all I could see was that black, bounding silhouette. The image evoked a Tungus belief that stalking tigers use the sun to blind their prey, leaping out of that wild fireball at dawn or sunset like a tongue of flame."
He describes watching from the plane as the tagged tigress, Nadia, makes a run for a conifer grove: "As the plane banked across the treetops, I saw the warm burnt-orange creature moving toward me among the sunlit evergreens on the white snow. Feeling herself hidden, or at least safe, she did not bother to look up or turn aside, but moved ahead, intent on her own path, on the sparkling white corridor between the pines."
Later he records his grief and rage on discovering that the same tigress, along with two of the other monitored animals, had been poached and violently destroyed.
Like so much else of the natural world, we have taken tigers for granted. Only now, with three subspecies gone and the remaining five facing extinction, are we prepared to stop and wonder at the glory of the silent hunter, the god of fire shaped by "fearful symmetry" and an immortal artist's eye.
Tigers in the Snow by Peter Matthiessen, with introduction and photographs by Maurice Hornocker is published by Harvill, £22.50