As of 2022, the global wild tiger population was estimated to number 4,500 mature individuals, with most populations living in small isolated pockets. The species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. India currently hosts the largest tiger population. Just a century ago, more than 100,000 tigers roamed Asia. One of the largest challenges facing the species is human tiger conflict. Many countries, have more than doubled their tiger population since 2010, but have destroyed most of their tiger habitat. This has resulted in countless interactions between humans and tigers.
Major reasons for population decline are threats which are common to most species of wildlife. These include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching. Tigers are victims of human–wildlife conflict, due to encroachment in countries with a high human population density.
Understanding tiger range
Tigers ranged widely from the Eastern Anatolia Region in the west to the Amur River basin in the east, and in the south from the foothills of the Himalayas to Bali in the Sunda Islands. Since the early 20th century, tiger populations have lost at least 93% of their historic range and have been extirpated from Western and Central Asia, the islands of Java and Bali, and in large areas of Southeast and South Asia and China. What remains of the range where tigers still roam free is fragmented, stretching in spots from Siberian temperate forests to subtropical and tropical forests on the Indian subcontinent, Indochina and a single Indonesian island, Sumatra.
Tigers require large contiguous areas of habitat to support its requirements for prey. They establish and maintain territories but have much wider home ranges within which they roam. The size of the home range mainly depends on prey abundance, geographic area and sex of the individual. In India, home ranges appear to be 50 to 1,000 km2 (19 to 386 sq mi) while in Manchuria, they range from 500 to 4,000 km2 (190 to 1,540 sq mi). In Nepal, defended territories are recorded to be 19 to 151 km2 (7.3 to 58.3 sq mi) for males and 10 to 51 km2 (3.9 to 19.7 sq mi) for females.
Lack of continous habitat is the main cause of Human Wildlife Conflict!
Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) can be found all over the world and has been a worldwide problem for many centuries. In felid conservation, conflicts between people and felids have become the most urgent issues worldwide. Being predators, felids are the most prominent species causing human-wildlife conflicts and are commonly considered as a threat to human safety and livestock (by predation).
Felids are particularly predisposed to conflicts with humans because of their large home range and dietary requirements. Felids involved in conflicts where people get injured or killed, or livestock predated often get killed in retaliation. Over 75% of the world’s felid species, for example caracal, cheetah, Eurasian lynx, jaguar, leopard, lion, puma, snow leopard and tiger, are affected by human-felid conflicts but especially Tigers.
Large roaming range of tigers is shrinking because of habitat destruction done by us humans for our living. We are destroying their territory for farming purposes or to build houses and villages. And this leads to Human-Tiger Conflicts.
Nowadays we hear that tigers are getting killed by poisoning or tigers are roaming in human population areas or attacking livestock and even people. So, what are the causes of this Human Tiger conflicts?
What are the main causes of human tiger conflict?
Habitat availability
Tigers have large range requirements to survive, including high-quality habitat composed of core forest. Competition between tigers and humans for space is the main factor causing conflicts. In most areas of the world, human populations remain to grow. Thus, human society has continued to dominate the landscape and human impact and movements go far beyond the edges of cities and into wild habitats. This incursion of humans into wild habitats, plus habituation of some wildlife species, has resulted in increased potential for human–wildlife encounters, including wildlife attacks on humans.
Forest degradation, fragmentation and habitat loss is incoherent with decreasing tiger habitat and tigers’ prey habitat; hence the tiger’s prey will decrease and tigers will come to villages to look for food. Therefore, the conflict potential between tigers and humans living in and near forested areas is rising.
Wild prey availability
Besides habitat loss, depletions of tiger’s prey by hunting and competition with livestock for land are rapidly becoming a serious threat to tigers over large parts of their range. High pressure on the tiger’s prey makes the number of prey decrease. Hence, tigers will approach villages in search of food.
Zoning
Today conflicts are typically most likely to occur where human habitat and tiger habitat intervene, either along reserve edges or where people collect forest resources from inside or adjacent to tiger habitat. In multiple-use forests in India, where prey populations are low, tigers and other large carnivores annually kill 12% of livestock herds in some areas. In the Russian Far East, where livestock are less common, depredation rates of livestock probably do not exceed 100 animals per year.
Human behaviour and activity patterns
Activities which make people to enter tiger habitat, such as herding livestock or tending crops, increase the risk of tiger attacks on people. Hunting activities on tigers also increase the risk level of tiger attacks. Sleeping outside or in makeshift huts during summer months have been linked with increased risk of attack. Tigers in the Sundarbans attacked humans who entered their established territories in search of wood, honey or fish, thus causing them to defend their territories.
In Sumatra, tiger attacks on humans were most likely to occur while people were engaged in activities near forest edges, particularly with agriculture and estate crops and in areas with high or intermediate levels of disturbance.
Socio-economic determinants
The human dimension of conflicts is determined by the various and dynamic combination of sociocultural factors. Tolerance levels towards and severity levels of human tiger conflicts are determined by several factors. This includes attitudes, perceptions, belief systems, educational and value systems, religion, and the economic importance of livestock to communities. Increased risk levels for tiger attacks likely promote cautious or negative attitudes towards tigers and other predators. People with a negative attitude towards certain predator species tend to prevent future damage by killing the “problem animal”.
Tiger hunting
The tiger has been one of the most sought-after game animals of Asia. Tiger hunting took place on a large scale in the early 19th and 20th centuries, being a recognised and admired sport by the British in colonial India, the maharajas and aristocratic class of the erstwhile princely states of pre-independence India. A single maharaja or English hunter could claim to kill over a hundred tigers in their hunting career.
Over 80,000 tigers were slaughtered in just 50 years spanning from 1875 to 1925 in British-ruled India. Tiger hunting was done by some hunters on foot. Others sat up on machans with a goat or buffalo tied out as bait. King George V on his visit to Colonial India in 1911 killed 39 tigers in a matter of 10 days.
Historically, tigers have been hunted at a large scale so their famous striped skins could be collected. The trade in tiger skins peaked in the 1960s, just before international conservation efforts took effect. By 1977, a tiger skin in an English market was considered to be worth US$4,250. An example of this is the controversial killing of the apparent man-eater Avni.
Written by: Atharv Deshmukh
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