The brown bear is the animal most commonly thought of as the national symbol of Russia. But, if you are
a resident of the Russian Far East – the Primorsky and Khabarovsky regions – Russia is Tiger Country.
The Amur Tiger, commonly called the Siberian Tiger, is one of the biggest big cats in the world. Male tigers can weigh 350 kilos and measure up to three meters long. An Amur Tiger has a range of some 500 square kilometers, and can travel a hundred kilometers in a single day.
Affection for the Amur Tiger in the Russian Far East is so strong that the big cat has its own day every year – on a Saturday at the end of September, shared with its feline cousin the Amur Leopard. Locals devote a day of dancing and singing to commemorate the cats; school children paint their faces with orange, black and white stripes and dress-up in tiger costumes. Yet the celebrations are bittersweet, because Amur Tigers and Leopards are teetering on the brink of extinction. In fact, the festivities began a few years ago not simply to celebrate these most rare and beautiful big cats, but to draw international attention to their plight.
In the last 70 years, three sub-species of tiger have disappeared from the planet and the Amur Tiger is in serious danger of following in their tracks.
While once thousands of tigers roamed this remote region on Russia’s Pacific Coast, now just a few hundred remain (up from just forty in the dark days of the Great Patriotic War). Some conservationists are encouraged by recent research, which suggests tiger numbers have stabilized. But few are taking this situation for granted.
There are six main zapovedniks (strict nature preserves) in this region and numerous zakazniks (nature sanctuaries) to provide protection for Amur Tigers, but together they amount to less than ten percent of the habitat the subspecies needs to survive. Add to this habitat destruction from logging and forest fires, and the tigers are clearly hemmed in. But this is far from the worst of their woes.
Battling Poachers
So elusive are these magnificent creatures that locals can live their entire lives in Amur Tiger country and never catch a glimpse of a wild tiger. Others, however, make it their business to hunt the tigers down.
Talk to poachers in the region and they will recount similar tales about poaching being a way-of-life. Most claim they hunt simply to feed their families and would gladly choose an alternative, if one existed. If it comes down to a choice between their survival and that of the tiger, then many locals believe there is just one choice, particularly for farmers or villagers who have suffered the loss of livestock to a big cat. There may be plenty of sympathy for the plight of the Amur Tiger, but there’s no room for sentimentality.
Andrei Sergeyevich (not his real name) has been hunting and poaching in the Khazansky region since the Soviet era. He claims never to have killed a tiger, but has noticed the direct impact of political and economic changes on local tiger populations. “In the 1980’s and the beginning of the 1990’s, there weren’t so many tigers around,” Andrei said. “I would walk into the forest from Razdolnoye to Khazan and see very few tigers. Those days were chaotic and uncertain for many of us and tigers were being killed and sold for as much as $25,000. When perestroika started and unemployment followed, tigers were being wiped out. Now, in my district, which is about 21,000 hectares, there are about 18 tigers and everything is okay.”
Unfortunately, Andrei’s optimism may be unfounded. Tiger poaching is not a thing of the past. It is driven by an insatiable demand for tiger skins, bones and body parts used principally in traditional Chinese medicine. Tiger skins end up as rugs and their heads are paraded as trophies. A tiger’s penis is sought after as an aphrodisiac and even tiger whiskers are hacked-off in the barmy belief that they will induce the birth of a baby boy in preference to a girl. The leftovers are literally food and drink to the Chinese, as tiger meat is a delicacy at special banquets washed down with tiger-bone wine.
This thriving market for tigers is of course right on Russia’s doorstep. China virtually destroyed its own wild tiger population years ago and illegal tiger traders now look across their northern border for fresh supplies.
In a desperate bid to combat the illegal tiger trade, an anti-poaching unit – Inspection Tiger – was established in the early 1990’s. As part of the Primorsky Krai State Committee for Environmental Protection, Inspection Tiger officers are in effect environmental police, but they receive additional support from international wildlife charities.
There are a number of Inspection Tiger teams in the region and, despite facing the daunting task of patrolling thousands of square kilometers, often in hazardous, wintry conditions, they have had remarkable success. Since Inspection Tiger’s formation, the teams have arrested thousands of poachers and illegal hunters, confiscated hundreds of weapons, snares and traps, and seized dozens of Amur Tiger skins and skeletons. But, as poacher Andrei Sergeyevich is quick to point-out, “They cannot close all the roads. There are millions of roads in Khazan district and there are an awful lot of roads in the taiga!”
It is also impossible to completely control the vast, 4,300 km Russian border with China, and skirmishes between poachers and border patrols in the Russian Far East have resulted in serious injury and even death. Despite the determined efforts of anti-poaching units, border guards and customs officers, Amur Tiger skins and bones are still being smuggled into China.
Less than a year ago, at the same time as an anti-poaching unit in Primorsky region intercepted three tiger skins being smuggled across the border, I personally came across a young adult Amur tiger skin on sale in China for $18,000. The dealer claimed the tiger came from Harbin, just a few hundred miles from the Russo-Chinese border, home to a tiger farm and also a notorious trade center in the illegal wildlife trade. The tiger was less than a year-old when it was shot and was just one of dozens of big cat skins openly on sale.
Sergei Bereznyuk worked for Inspection Tiger for several years and is now Director of the Vladivostok-based non-governmental conservation group Phoenix Fund. Sergei knows that winning hearts and minds of locals is not easy. In one of the poorer regions of Russia, the prospect of being paid more than a year’s salary for a single tiger skin is highly tempting. It is a problem shared by the electorate and the elected alike.
“Unfortunately,” Bereznyuk said, “economic problems prevail in the local administration and it is hard to convince people in charge that conservation can generate cash. We want to preserve the wildlife here and encourage tourism. It is difficult to persuade them to see the long-term benefits.”
In the late 1990s, Bereznyuk said, the short-sightedness of local politicians took an even more sinister turn. “We discovered that the former Governor of Primorsk presented a tiger skin as a gift to [Belarusan] President Lukashenko during an official visit to Vladivostok. Lukashenko took it home to Belarus. For us, as representatives of a government commission for the protection of the environment and upholding the regulations of the Convention on Trade on Endangered Species (CITES), it was clear that this was a violation of Russian and international law. How was it that, without proper papers or permits, an illegal skin of an animal listed in the Red Book was removed from the Russian Federation, and where did this skin come from? Inspection Tiger has jurisdiction over all violations concerning tigers in the Primorsk region. Why did we not know about this case?”
Despite an official inquiry, bureaucracy and procrastination prevailed, the statue of limitations for the case passed and no one was punished for the crime. The saga was frustrating, Bereznyuk said, but “the good thing was that the story generated a great deal of publicity, not only in the Primorsk region, but in Russia and even abroad, and that must have had an effect. We have not heard of a situation since where a tiger skin changed hands so openly and that is an achievement.”
Still, even those who are supposed to enforce the law do the opposite. Inspection Tiger has encountered countless cases of corruption, from officials being bribed to turn a blind eye to wildlife crime, to active participation in the illegal business. Some years ago in Ussuriysk, a senior policeman was found to be regularly trading in tiger skins. Though exposed as a major dealer and caught red-handed with five Amur Tiger skins, he was never fully prosecuted and simply was forced to take early retirement. He is now believed to be back in business, selling tiger skins and parts to Chinese and Korean dealers and has even branched out into other species, including bears.
The limitations of the law are a source of continual frustration for Inspection Tiger and environmental groups such as Phoenix. “If you compare Russian environmental regulations to those of Europe or America,” Bereznyuk said, “in my view as a former inspector, they are very poor. Today, anyone involved in trading tiger skins or bones is only charged with an administrative violation. In reality, if he is caught trading tiger skins, under the law he only has to pay a fine of at most $60. Such a fine won’t stop anybody, because you can make a lot more money by selling the skin or bones. Selling one tiger skin is worth more than ten fines. Obviously we will never be able to raise the penalty to the total value of a tiger skin, but at least the law is partly discouraging poaching.”
It is a sad fact that most financial support for protecting Amur Tigers comes from outside Russia. Even those who have reaped the enormous monetary benefits from the Country’s vast natural resources, such as the “oligarchs,” have been slow to respond to environmental appeals; they apparently have yet to make the connection between the source of their wealth and threats to its long-term security.
Several international wildlife charities (under the umbrella organisation of ALTA, the Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance) fund tiger conservation in the Russian Far East and regular donors include a number of large corporations, but the majority are American or European. Even the Anglo-Russian charity AMUR, set-up in 2001 specifically to raise funds and support for Amur Tiger and Leopard conservation (see box, page 31), still raises most of its money outside Tiger Country, and only very recently have a few Russian companies begun to pledge support.
False Aid
In a bid to appear more environmentally aware and feline friendly, Chinese entrepreneurs have opened some 20 tiger farms that they claim take the pressure off wild tiger populations. But selling tiger products – wild or otherwise – remains illegal, despite pressure from tiger farm owners. Critics argue that tiger farms (the largest has about 1,000 tigers of different species) are money-making attractions that are both unhealthy and unnatural for tigers. What is more, the open sale of tiger products from tiger farms can actively encourage poaching by perpetuating demand, particularly when the perceived potency of tiger parts from wild tigers makes them more highly-prized.
The tiger farmers further claim that they will eventually release their farm-raised cats into the wild, in the hope that it might eventually increase the tigers to a stable, wild population. Sarah Christie, head of the Zoological Society of London’s Carnivore Programme, has years of experience both with management of captive tiger populations and with conservation in the Russian Far East. “It’s misleading to imagine that you could make up for mortalities from poaching, or from a shortage of prey animals, by releasing captive-bred tigers into the wild,” Christie said. “Apart from the difficulties for young tigers in learning to live in the wild without a mother’s experience to guide them, you’re actually tackling the wrong end of the problem... It is almost never the birth rate that there is a problem with. The problem is generally that mortality rates are too high for various reasons. So to halt a decline or make the population begin to grow, you need to reduce the causes of death, such as poaching or lack of prey animals...” Some 80 percent of the tigers’ high death rate is attributable to human activity.
And there is another problem: big cats that are reintroduced into the wild are more prone to killing humans and livestock, for being more familiar with humans. “If the released tiger did not stay away from people,” Christie said, “then the whole operation would give tiger conservation very bad press with the local people, whose support is essential. It follows that big cat reintroductions should only be attempted as a last ditch effort.... Chinese tiger farm owners are not motivated by any concern for wild tigers, merely by a desire to make large profits and their ill-informed suggestions of reintroduction are nothing but a smokescreen.”
While Inspection Tiger continues its work to lower the high Amur Tiger death rate, Bereznyuk and like-minded conservationists believe the best way forward is ultimately through education. If locals – in particular children, through events like Amur Tiger and Leopard Day – learn to love and value their unique wildlife, then the big cats may have a chance. RL
FURTHER READING
Peter Matthiesen’s 2000 book Tigers in the Snow, is a thorough guide to the Siberian tiger, in Russia and beyond. It features Maurice Nornocker’s wonderful photography and focuses mainly on Russia, but includes a wealth of knowledge on the origin, evolution and cultural significance of tigers in Russian, Chinese and other world cultures. It is out of print, but used copies can be found, including in paperback.
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