South Africa has no shortage of big wild cats. But the sleek predators prowling these dry grass plains at the edge of the Karoo plateau have one big difference: stripes.
As part of a controversial experiment to save the world’s most endangered tiger, three rare zoo-bred South China tigers are learning to hunt antelope and survive in the wild in South Africa’s grasslands while conservationists struggle to restore their nearly vanished habitat at home.
With only about 60 of the tigers left in captivity and almost none in the wild, the experiment is a last-ditch effort to pull the South China tiger back from the brink of extinction and create a viable new wild population, with roots half a world away. The project hopes to return all the tigers to China within 15 years.
“It’s an extremely risky project. Some people have written the Chinese tiger off. They argue we’re spending money on a lost cause,” said Li Quan, 44, the effort’s founder, as she wrestled a truck through the rough scrub of the tigers’ 80,000-acre reserve. “But we have to try. And what’s money compared to saving an ancient species?”
South Africa has no native tigers, an Asian species. But with its vast, well-managed game reserves, the country has a deep reservoir of expertise in wildlife management and restoring animals to rehabilitated land. That expertise, the country’s abundant antelope populations and its relatively inexpensive land are the chief reasons the tiger rescue effort is happening in Africa rather than in China.
“Expertise, abundance of prey animals and land–that’s why we chose South Africa,” said Quan, a former Chinese fashion executive who heads the non-profit Save China’s Tigers foundation. At home, she said, hunting–uncontrolled until recently–has left not only the tiger but also most of its prey species endangered. Land is also in short supply, one reason tiger populations have plunged from an estimated 40,000 animals a century ago.
Difficulty in adapting
Adapting from a zoo cage to the African wilds has not been entirely easy for the project’s tigers. Since arriving as cubs in late 2003 and late 2004, under an agreement with the Chinese government, the animals have suffered bouts of ringworm, been bitten by baboons, had throat and gum infections and shoulder sprains and gotten a few porcupine quills in the nose. One arrived with broken baby teeth, apparently after gnawing the bars of an iron transport cage in China.
Hunting, at first, did not come naturally. When a rooster was released into a holding pen with the first pair of cubs, both predators and prey “just stood there eyeing each other,” Quan remembers. When the rooster ran, the cubs gave chase. When he stopped, they did too, looking a little puzzled.
Slowly, however, the tigers have gained size and skill. Confronted with a small antelope for the first time, they ran straight at the animal–and were easily outrun. Eventually, panting and exhausted, they learned to slink through the grass and hide in gullies, waiting for the antelope to wander close enough before charging.
Today, 3-year-old Cathay, the oldest and most experienced of the tigers, can easily down a 180-pound blesbuck, one of a herd of the chocolate-colored antelope roaming the reserve, and deliver a killing bite, then drag the prey to a secluded spot along the Orange River, which runs through the area.
Two other younger tigers, named Tiger Woods and Madonna by project supporters, similarly are gaining skill and recently downed two blesbuck–about the size of the tigers’ traditional prey of deer and wild boar–in two days.
“They have been very successful. They can essentially sustain themselves,” said Petri Viljoen, a South African zoologist who oversees the project.
And if the tigers can catch game in open plains, he said, “it’s pretty good proof they can cope with hunting more [secretive] prey in thickets or forests” in their Chinese mountain habitat.
Besides habitat loss, the toughest problem facing the South China tiger is dwindling genetic diversity. With so few left, inbreeding is common, and zoo animals, the descendants of just a handful of captive tigers, are often born with telltale short tails or crooked necks.
Other species have gone through similar genetic “bottlenecks” in history and successfully emerged. Scientists believe all the cheetahs alive today are the descendants of perhaps six animals that survived such a bottleneck about 10,000 years ago.
Whether the South China tiger can do the same remains uncertain. The only way to find out, they say, is to choose mates as unrelated as possible and then to breed as many animals as quickly as possible, hoping the genetically strongest will survive.
“We believe there should be adequate diversity left,” Viljoen said. “I don’t think we’ve reached a point yet where it’s beyond rectifying.”
Cub’s death a setback
The project, which aims to breed tiger cubs for return to wild reserves in China, hit a major setback last year when Hope, the male of the first pair of cubs shipped to South Africa, died after a sudden illness, just before reaching breeding age. An autopsy showed he had suffered pneumonia and heart failure.
Getting more cubs also is a challenge. While the Chinese government has promised the South African project 5 to 10 cubs by 2007, it has so far received only four, largely because 8 of the 10 cubs born in Chinese zoos last year died. Tiger conservationists are hoping for healthier Chinese litters this year, and Quan hopes Tiger Woods and Madonna will begin breeding next year.
The project has stirred intense criticism from some international big cat experts, who argue tigers should be preserved in their natural habitat and that moving them to South Africa exposes them and South African cats to new disease risks, despite the tigers being quarantined on arrival.
“To go to the considerable expense and risk of failure by bringing the animals into a totally different environment and habituating them to different prey is highly questionable,” the cat specialist group of the World Conservation Union wrote in an opinion on the project.
Project officials say they agree the work could best be done in China, but that isn’t possible. Two new tiger reserves, funded in part by Save China’s Tigers, are in the planning stages, and South African habitat rehabilitation specialists are working with Chinese officials to restore farmland to forest, but opening the reserves will take years. Meantime, the South Africa program is the best option, its backers say.
“You can keep strategizing about how to save them until the day you lose the last one,” said Ronel Openshaw, a spokeswoman for the foundation. “This is the last stand.”
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lgoering@tribune.com
