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It's a serious situation. The news that in the last couple of days two more tiger skins have been seized out west is really bloody alarming. More information is coming through, I thank those who took the time to read my blog yesterday, it pointed to Pragati's piece in the Kathmandu Post, published before the latest seizures.
Yeah it's Valentine's Day. Big bloody deal. Six years ago I spent this day at the Namo Buddha stupa on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley, it was 14 February 2010, the first day of the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar. The stupa is where the story is told of an incarnation of the Buddha sacrificing his life to a starving tigress so that she could feed her cubs. It seemed the best place for me to be at the time as I made further commitments to my work.
So it's six years, halfway to the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. A lot has happened but despite all the proclamations, promises and continual verbals (we humans are so good at that) the question has to be asked ...has the situation improved?
My own answer to that in a nutshell is... NO. Sure there have been advances, changes and many, many more promises in that time but the wild tiger population, which looked promising and stable for a time (there was hope), is under attack again in a big way.
Consider this. It's not exact science of course but for every tiger skin seizure we know about it can be estimated there are three to four tigers taken we don't know about. So two skins may equal six, maybe eight skins. For every tiger taken there are four to five leopards taken, I think more. Do the maths. It's bloody serious.
My blog about "perceptions" is upcoming as wildtiger.org and wildleopard.net get updated in next few days. Hang onto your hats, we are all responsible for this mess.
While most of my work this year will be concentrating on human/leopard conflict mitigation using technological advances to help I'm also going to re immerse myself in the anti-poaching situation. I'm going to raise a lot of money for Community Based Anti-Poaching, I'm going to continue to work my arse off. The money will go where it's needed, straight to the ground... not to the verbalizers.
Happy Valentines Day. Yeah right.
