This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 26, 2024 - September 1, 2024

Throughout history, human-wildlife conflict has posed problems to farmers. Until the late 20th century, this was normally addressed by killing wildlife. Whether one follows the 1980 World Conservation Strategy approach that regards wildlife as just a means to help support human economic well-being, or prefers a more philosophical and ethical rationale, wildlife, especially threatened species, now needs urgent attention.

Large wild animals have now been squeezed into clusters in scattered and entirely insufficient remnants of natural habitats. A few species thrive in these circumstances, but most do not. Efforts to manage human-wildlife conflict often tend to be reactive, piecemeal and plagued by short-term thinking.

Prevailing paradigms need to be shifted — a difficult challenge in view of the human tendency to resist change.

A basic problem is that we humans tend to see wildlife in terms of individuals in distress, not as populations that need to be managed, either directly or through sustained manipulation of habitat or prey.

Common words of exhortations applied to threatened wildlife nowadays include save, rescue, protect, preserve and boots-on-the-ground. Common exhortations regarding their habitat include conservation efforts, restore and plant. These words are important to raise awareness of and funds for conservation, but do little to address the underlying need: population management.

For some species, numbers need to be reduced, while others should be sustained at current levels. And for threatened ones, numbers need to be increased in order to prevent extinction. People like simple explanations that intuitively sound right, but might well be wrong because our generally poor understanding of basic biology promotes wrong answers.

Take the Malayan tiger. The remaining tiger habitat in Malaysia is primarily hill and mountain forests — all very suboptimal. Productivity of their food is very low. One adult tiger needs one large mammal as food every week. Tigers are not evolved to feed on small things such as frogs, rats or durians. And we do not want them to feed on dogs, cattle and humans. Say there are 10 adult tigers in one area. They collectively need about 500 large deer or large pigs or seladang every year as food. To sustain this little population of tigers, therefore, at least 500 large prey animals need to be born every year.

Pigs in Malaysia have recently experienced a catastrophe. African swine fever killed very many of them from 2021 to 2023. Some areas of Malaysia are almost devoid of wild pigs. This could be a major contributory explanation for why many tigers have “come out” and been seen or killed over the past few years. Seladang are also as rare as tigers. So, it may be down to the existence of a deer population that is producing over 500 fawns annually to sustain the 10 tigers.

Now, imagine any area of forest in Malaysia. Do you think 500 deer are born there annually? The answer is no.

No one area in Malaysia has a large number of deer. More importantly, no one area has plentiful tracts of deer food. For the Malayan tiger now, whether as an individual or as a remnant cluster of individuals, arguably the biggest need would be to drastically increase their food supply. Which means drastically increasing the supply of deer. Without that, tiger reproductivity will not increase and numbers may not be able to reach carrying capacities or even recover at all.

Just as tigers need deer as food, deer need grass and supplementary minerals in order to build up their numbers. Equal in importance to reducing poaching is to initiate and sustain properly managed feeding grounds for deer. But even these need to be well protected by rangers to prevent them from becoming shooting galleries.

Even if all of these measures are in place, one needs to consider tiger population biology. If there is at least one fertile female and one fertile male tiger (aged four to 12 years, their normal optimum reproductive age range), they will indeed produce cubs. After two to three years, the young will disperse, the male will move further away, the female usually to adjacent forests. The old male and female will no longer be fully fertile after the age of 12. The old (and often now infertile male) could chase out younger males or other transient males might chase out a fertile male resident.

Publicly available information from June 2023 to July 2024 shows that at least 10 wild Malayan tigers were killed or removed from the wild (the latter being equivalent to death as they no longer contribute to reproduction). Of those, eight were males (three hit by cars, the remainder seemingly killed by local people or captured by authorities), one was a female (the only one snared by foreign poachers) and one unknown. This preponderance of males is unsurprising because they could be seeking (non-existent) new territories for themselves, while being pushed to the edge due to habitat loss or disturbance.

In this 2023/24 list of tiger deaths, we are tempted to see this as “more (recorded) deaths, more tigers exist”. A similar syndrome occurred with another large Malaysian mammal, the Sumatran rhinoceros. They kept “coming out” during the 1950s to 1990s, until none were left.

Habitat loss, poaching, oil palm expansion, logging and highway development are certainly still major issues if we want to conserve Malaysia’s overall biological diversity of plants and small creatures. Continuing forest loss remains a major concern. The majority of habitat loss in Malaysia has already occurred in the 20th century. To this day, however, satellite data still show no signs of any slowdown in the loss of primary forest due to conversion to commercial crops.

It is laudable that the federal government has poured more resources into anti-poaching and regular long-term monitoring, and state governments have recently gazetted new protected areas encompassing tiger habitats, such as Kenyir State Park in Terengganu and the Al-Sultan Abdullah Royal Tiger Reserve in Pahang. However, tigers are still threatened by insufficient nutrition and food productivity in any one place to recover and sustain a viable population. To address these threats, programmes that seek specific solutions need to be developed and implemented.

But how do we get more of these programmes started and funded long term? Funding, of course, is a major impediment, with short-term CSR funding being insufficient. How can we get sufficient capital? One could look at the rhino impact bond in South Africa, which raised significant start-up funds from “coupons” forgone by investors, who will be paid back by outcome payers contingent on pre-agreed milestones based on rhino population growth.

One could envisage a wildlife impact bond covering landscapes in Peninsular Malaysia for threatened species such as the Malayan tiger. Instead of designing a bond with traditional key performance indicators involving a target species population growth, we can include milestones that require an increase in hectares of prey habitat such as grasslands, and a decrease in poaching incidents in tiger and prey habitats.

Readers for whom green financial instruments such as wildlife impact bonds are not relevant can still play a role by deploying a very precious commodity: casting a critical eye on whatever story we see in public domain (in this case, in relation to tigers) and making one’s own assessment of its plausibility. Then, support only the rational arguments, whether that be through advocacy to government, own corporate policy, social media, funding, spreading the word, or any other means within one’s sphere of influence.

John Payne is CEO of Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA), a small specialist wildlife management non-governmental organisation based in Sabah which initially aimed to prevent the extinction of the hairy (aka Sumatran) rhinoceros. Poaching and habitat loss are touted as the cause of this species’ extinction, but the reality is that it was on a trajectory to extinction due to insufficient births to match even natural deaths over the past century. Now, with a staff of only 18, mostly rural early school-leavers, BORA is introducing programmes to boost wild food productivity for Bornean orangutans and elephants and (perhaps most sadly) our two native wild cattle species, which people regard as “just cows”.

This column is part of a series coordinated by Climate Governance Malaysia, the national chapter of the World Economic Forum’s Climate Governance Initiative. The CGI is an effort to support boards of directors in discharging their duty of care as long-term stewards of the companies they oversee, specifically to ensure that climate risks and opportunities are adequately addressed.

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