Burning Bright (Cont.) | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Travel >> Burning Bright (Cont.)

Today's Question
Where should I camp in Switzerland with my kids? answer

What's the best volcano to hike up in North America? answer

How can I plan a trip around riding the biggest, fastest roller coasters? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Online

Page:

Burning Bright (Cont.)

KNOWING I'D SEEN A TIGER in Siberia, Rashid was anxious for me to see one in his country and especially at Kanha, where the ecosystem, including what field biologists call the "prey base," was so evidently intact. But sightings were not so simple anymore, as Rashid warned me. The former custom of permitting the park's tame elephants to pick up visitors along the tracks and trundle them to where the mahouts had located feeding or resting tigers had been suspended by the park director two years earlier.

In the old days, live bait was set out for tigers, first to accommodate famous hunters, then VIPs, then researchers. Growing accustomed to these easy feeds, the big cats could be counted on to remain there at the kill, all set for gun or camera in the morning. The practice of baiting, which acculturated and corrupted the dwindling tigers, was finally banned in the late 1970s.

In the years that followed, the mahouts and their elephants would go out early in the morning to locate a tiger on a kill. In this way, the elephant men remained familiar with the territories and routes and habits of the seven or eight tigers drawn to the vicinity of Kanha Village by the abundant prey animals in the maidans. When a tiger was found, word was sent to park headquarters, which dispatched more elephants to the nearest point along the tracks. There the assembled visitors, convened quickly, were laddered up onto a pachyderm and trundled to the tiger, which was often less than a hundred yards back in the bush.

In this manner, in what became known as the Tiger Show, most visitors "got" their tiger in short order. But in 1993, at Christmas, Kanha's busiest season, the backing and filling at the road was witnessed at its most noisy and disorderly by important Indian conservationists, including Valmik Thapar, a noted tiger wallah and nature writer, and Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary Asia magazine. These members of Belinda's Wildlife Prevention Society were outraged not only by the unseemly spectacle but by the possibility that the whole circus was a transgression of the tiger's domain, demeaning to the animals and dangerous as well, making them more habituated to the presence of human beings and therefore more vulnerable to poachers. A few months later, after Thapar, Sahgal, and fellow tiger conservationists protested with angry letters to the Minister of Environment and Forests and with op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers, the Tiger Show came to an end.

Rashid Ali acknowledged that the confusion occasionally got out of hand, but he also believes that it could have been controlled without eliminating the tiger viewing entirely and that, in the long term, the educational benefits and potential enlistment of public support for wildlife far outweighed any harm done by the carnival atmosphere.

One afternoon I accompanied Rashid to the park headquarters at Mandla, 47 miles away on the banks of the Narmada River. There we met with the urbane young park director, Rajesh Gopal, author of a noted book on wildlife management, whose opinion it was that this forested eastern part of Madhya Pradesh—and Kanha in particular—is the best tiger habitat in India. Despite a scarcity of water in the dry season, he explained, the forest produces an astonishing biomass of ungulates such as deer and wild pigs, which in turn support one of the highest densities of tiger in the country. Hearing about my unsuccessful quest, Mr. Gopal rang the office of the Forest Service at Kanha with instructions to provide us a park elephant for morning reconnaissance during the remainder of my stay.

Page: