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Combatting Tiger Poaching

The Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae is the last surviving subspecies of tiger in Indonesia; the Balinese tiger became extinct in the 1940s and the Javanese tiger in the early 1980s.

It is currently estimated that between 300 and 400 tigers remain in Sumatra’s national parks and nature reserves. The most important of these areas is the immense Kerinci-Seblat National Park, a World Heritage site covering more than 10,000 square miles and spanning four provinces of central western Sumatra with habitat capacity for over 150 tigers.

Fauna & Flora International has been working in Kerinci-Seblat since 1995. Tiger Protection and Conservation Units comprising rangers recruited from forest edge communities and led by a park ranger on full-time secondment to the programme, arrest offenders and enforce the law within the national park and outside the forest.

Although the presence of rangers is a strong deterrent, the chances of catching a poacher red-handed in such a vast national park are remote. The team must therefore employ other techniques to bring offenders to justice, building information networks and painstaking undercover investigations to penetrate poaching and trafficking syndicates in the four provinces around the park and secure evidence for subsequent law enforcement operations and prosecutions.

Since the Tiger Protection and Conservation Units came into operation, many poachers and animal traders have been arrested, resulting in the seizure of skins and other body parts of Sumatran tigers and other protected species including Malay sun bear, tapir and clouded leopard. Those arrested actually go to prison, on occasion for substantial periods of time, as members of the park-edge judiciary begin to appreciate the seriousness of the offence.

Most recently Fauna & Flora International helped form a network of local NGOs from districts around the national park. They have been awarded an emergency grant to campaign against proposals to build at least four major roads through the heart of the national park. These road-building proposals are the greatest threat ever faced by Kerinci-Seblat. If approved, they would almost certainly culminate in the park’s demise and the loss of all of its Sumatran tigers.

In early 2009, conflict between communities and wildlife in Sumatra flared up, which resulted in the deaths of both people and tigers. Incidences such as this are thankfully isolated due to the work of the Tiger Protection and Conservation Units. However it underlines the importance of ongoing protection efforts in this region.