Tale of the Cat

"Without the breath of the tiger there will be no wind, only clouds, and certainly no rain." —The I Ching
"I'll be quite honest with you," says Ron Tilson, director of conservation at
Minnesota Zoo, co-author of a new edition of the encyclopedic Tigers of the World and, with decades of fieldwork in Asia's tiger habitats under his belt, an authority — maybe the authority — on our most endangered big cat. "I've never seen a wild tiger."

There's more. "I'm actually allergic to tigers," continues Tilson, 66. "If I touch them, I break out in hives." He chuckles. "Figure that. I'm the world expert. Never seen one. And I'm allergic to them."

While the allergy is incurable, Tilson might yet see his first wild tiger, in a central Chinese wilderness he is playing an almost godlike role in creating. Thanks to a unique collaboration between Minnesota Zoo, China's State Forestry Administration (SFA), and a Bangkok-based environmental financier called International Consultancy Europe (ICE), a plan is under way to reintroduce the South China tiger, the rarest of the world's five surviving subspecies, back into its natural habitat. In this Year of the Tiger, the project has secured $3 million to restore a 250,000-acre (100,000 hectare) nature reserve straddling the borders of Hubei and Hunan provinces.

Half of this grant has been provided by the Chinese government, whose high-level interest in the project is easy to understand. Panthera tigris amoyensis is the progenitor of all modern tigers and the only subspecies unique to China. "You have a culture that reveres the tiger," says Tilson. "It's part of their fabric." By pulling a Chinese subspecies from the brink of extinction, China seeks not only to overturn an appalling record on conservation and the environment but also to gain a powerful new icon of national resurgence — not a cuddly giant panda this time but a formidable predator that eats herbivores for breakfast.

Tigers have never before been reintroduced to the wild. This is partly because scarce conservation resources are usually devoted to what Tilson calls "a failed strategy": protecting what few tiger habitats remain. "There needs to be a new paradigm," says Tilson. His answer? "Let's create wildernesses, as opposed to trying to protect the little fragments that are left." Hopes for resurrecting the South China subspecies rest largely on a captive population of 67 tigers, held in zoos across China. It will be challenging. Derived from just six animals — two male, four female — caught between 1958 and 1970, they are so inbred that they are virtually brothers and sisters. But, Tilson adds, "China is an economic juggernaut, a military powerhouse. As part of that portfolio they need to bring back the icon of Asian wilderness. And that's the tiger."

In half a century, the wild South China tiger population in China has been reduced from perhaps 4,000 to — Beijing disputes this — none. During Mao Zedong's time they were considered a pest and extermination campaigns were launched against them. Also taking a toll were loss of habitat, declining prey numbers and, as the economy took off, growing demand from traditional Chinese medicine for every part of the animal: whiskers, penis, bone, even feces.

Not one but four subspecies of tiger — Siberian, Indochinese, Bengal and South China — have been all but killed off within China's borders. In 1993, Beijing banned the nation's domestic trade in tigers and their parts and, today, China is one of 175 parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which outlawed tiger trafficking globally. But Chinese demand still drives a lucrative pan-Asian trade in poached tigers, which other countries blame for the accelerating decline in their own wild populations. In India, 88 tigers were killed in 2009 — double the previous year's figure.

China, where tiger-hunting was legal until 1977, is not the only country with a poor record of conservation. Tigers are also found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam — but only just. A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers in the wild in Asia. Now their numbers are at an "all time low" of 3,200, estimates the WWF, which in January warned the animals could be extinct in the wild by 2022 — the next Year of the Tiger — unless new efforts are made to save them.

Today, penalties for harming tigers in China are harsh — a villager in Yunnan province was recently jailed for 12 years for killing and eating what might well have been the country's last wild Indochinese tiger. But the laws are patchily enforced. In December the SFA released a directive promising better protection of wild tigers and a sterner crackdown on the illegal trade. Many conservationists remain unconvinced. "We've heard these words before from China," says Mike Baltzer, leader of the World Bank – backed Global Tiger Initiative at the conservation group WWF. "We're waiting to see if they really have any teeth." Vivek Menon, executive director of the Wildlife Trust of India, says China's responsibilities are clear. "They've saved the panda," he says. "Now they must do the same for the tiger."

Tilson is used to skeptics. "Don't you read the newspapers?" he was asked by an outraged prospective donor in the U.S. "The goddamn Chinese eat their tigers and put them into medicine." But Tilson is convinced that China's economic and human resources make it uniquely placed to put tigers back in the wild. The South China project could help revolutionize Chinese attitudes to endangered species and kick-start other attempts to revitalize biodiversity. "China is at a tipping point in its conservation history," he says.