Malayan Tiger : The Last Days

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Malayan tiger's fate hangs by a whisker

WWF-Malaysia’s Tiger Lead, Dr. Mark Rayan Darmaraj said, “Almost a decade ago, Royal Belum State Park, part of Malaysia’s three tiger priority sites, used to have the highest density of tigers in the country of almost two tigers for every 100 square kilometers. Our rrecent surveys between 2015-2018, showed that the population within the larger Belum-Temengor Forest Complex has decline by at least 50%.”

If no immediate and drastic measures are taken to curb poaching, he predicts that local extinction would occur within three to four years. The prediction, made in 2019,  is damning news for Malaysia’s national icon. The Belum-Temenggor Forest Complex is one of Malaysia’s three critical tiger habitats. If endeavours were failing here, it didn’t bode well for the country’s remaining tigers. 

So how did Malaysia allow its wild tiger population to dwindle to such a perilous point?

This is part of a global decline that the world’s leading scientists are calling the ‘‘sixth mass extinction’’, where just a century ago 100,000 of these fierce beasts were thought to have prowled the earth. A highly adaptive species, Panthera tigris was king, not only of the jungle, but of a range of habitats, stretching from the east of Turkey to the desolate wintery taiga of Siberia in Russia, and from lowland mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans to the high altitude alpine meadows of Bhutan, across the sweltering tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia.

Trophy hunting, persecution, poaching and widespread habitat loss and fragmentation due to human population growth set in motion the tiger’s rapid decline. It also accelerated in the 1990s on the back of Asia’s burgeoning affluence and its insatiable appetite for exotic wildlife. 

Slaughtered for their skin, bones, blood and sexual organs for use in bogus traditional medicines and meaningless talismans, sold at exotic meat restaurants and into the pet trade as obscene symbols of wealth and social status, any poetry, romantic fable or exotic mythology that had been written around one of the world’s most remarkable creatures has been supplanted by misplaced values and selfish vanity.

By 2010, as few as 3,200 wild tigers remained, squeezed into a mere 7% of their historical range. The Java, Bali and Caspian tigers were extinct; the South China tiger functionally extinct – they were too few and too far apart to constitute a viable population. Only five subspecies remain, of which the Sumatran and Malayan tigers are at most risk of extinction.