George Schaller

http://discovermagazine.com/ 2008/mar/ 21-george- schaller. s-grand-plan- to-save-the- marco-polo- sheep/article_ view?b_start: int=0&-C=
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MARCH 2008
George Schaller's Grand Plan to Save the Marco Polo Sheep

"Obviously humans are evolution's greatest mistake," says George Schaller.
by Marion Long, Photography by Doron Gild

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote the 19th-century American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. The quotation is a favorite of George Schaller, considered the finest field biologist of our time and the most powerful voice for conservation in more than 100 years. Indeed, Schaller has described himself as "a 19th-century wanderer with a scientific bent…on an intangible and elusive search."

Schaller, who was born in Berlin in 1933 and came to the United States with his mother and brother in 1947, has loved animals and the outdoors for as long as he can remember. He was in graduate school in the mid-1950s when one of his professors asked him, half jokingly, "How would you like to study gorillas?" The 26-year-old was happy to settle deep in the forests of central Africa. There, he wrote rhapsodically and painstakingly about gorillas in the wild, changing public perception of the animal forever. He went on to study tigers in India, jaguars in Brazil, snow leopards in Pakistan, and lions in the Serengeti. His account of the latter, The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations, won a National Book Award in 1973.

In time Schaller came to view his early work as "a careless rapture" compared with another, more pressing concern: saving species from extinction caused by man's aggression. Schaller calls the work of conservation "a gigantic, continuous headache," explaining that "instead of just being a biologist—something for which I was trained—I must also be a fund-raiser, diplomat, politician, sociologist, anthropologist, everything at once."


His results as a conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society have been spectacular nevertheless. In 1980 he began working with the Chinese government to save the giant panda from extinction, and since then he has helped establish more than 20 wildlife parks and reserves around the world. Today, at 74, he is pursuing his most ambitious goal yet: building the Pamir International Peace Park at the junction of four countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and Tajikistan—in the process saving the spectacular spiral-horned Marco Polo sheep. In his latest book, A Naturalist and Other Beasts (Sierra Club), Schaller ponders his career of more than 50 years, although the mood is hardly retrospective. "I am not in search of memories," Schaller writes at the outset. "My interests lie in the future."

Do you have an earliest memory of feeling deeply connected to nature and wildlife?
I can't remember being interested in anything else. You start as a child: You like to ramble around and watch birds, turn over rocks, pick up snakes. I had a little zoo of salamanders and opossums and other creatures. Basically, I'm still doing what I did as a kid.

When did you first recognize the danger that people pose to the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants?
One of my first projects—I was 26—was studying mountain gorillas in central Africa. Humans were overrunning their habitat, and I realized the gorillas wouldn't have a future unless we saved that habitat.

Your field studies of beautiful animals won you recognition, yet your focus shifted to conservation biology. Why?
When I began my work, most of the big animals had never been studied, so when I sat with the gorillas, almost anything I observed was new and gave people an idea of what their lives were really like. But how can you watch the few hundred gorillas left in the world and not feel guilty about their precarious existence?

How do you choose a particular place for your next round of conservation efforts?
In recent years, I've looked at places where nobody's doing anything and try to see what I can do. For example, there are lots of nongovernmental organizations sitting in Nairobi, worrying about wildlife. But who goes to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iran? There, I think I can have an impact.

What do you do to gain the trust of the local government in countries where Americans are often viewed with suspicion?
They don't trust you until they know that you have no other agenda. I go in there, I'm focused on wildlife, and that's it.

How do you begin effective conservation in these countries?
I go in and get facts about the wildlife, the people, the condition of the habitat. You give the officials the information you've gathered; you give them suggestions and see what their response is. It's extremely important to have one local person—a chief or some local leader—who really cares and can do something about it.

Given all the strife in places like Iran and Afghanistan, how do you get people to pay attention to protecting wildlife?
We choose animals valued by the locals. For example, in 2001 I started a project in Iran. I went there and asked how I could be of assistance. They told me, "The last Asiatic cheetahs are here; only 50 or 60 may be left." Now we have a cheetah project there, and some of the animals are wearing radio collars, and Iran is very supportive in that work. If you choose a conspicuous animal like a cheetah, which Iran considers one of its natural treasures, not only does the government pay attention, but suddenly everybody's aware.
When you are near a mountain gorilla, you recognize it as kin. You feel as though you might put your arm around it and have a chat.

Why do people respond so strongly to certain animals?
I suspect it's because they're charismatic, they're beautiful, and you can see them easily. If the panda were all black, like a black bear, nobody would pay much attention to it. People feel they are helping to save one special animal to which they feel an emotional attachment, not realizing perhaps that the only way to do that is to preserve its whole life system, its territory, its food sources, and so on. When the giant panda became famous, the attention also benefited thousands of other plant and animal species that inhabited the same mountain forests.

Has any animal gained a special hold on your affections?
When you are near a mountain gorilla, you recognize it as kin. You feel as though you might put your arm around it and have a chat. When I first saw a gorilla, I felt a desire to communicate with him, to let him know that I intended him no harm and only wanted to be near him. And I wondered if he shared this feeling of kinship with me. Never before had I had that feeling meeting an animal. You don't get that feeling when you see a tiger, but your mind almost glows with the sight—they're absolutely gorgeous—and to see a tiger is one of the great wildlife experiences. I can also get enamored of capybaras, which are giant rodents and look like big guinea pigs, and even wild pigs. I have had two kinds of pig, a warthog and a white-lipped peccary, as pets. They are just as intelligent and social as dogs. I have an attachment to all the animals I've studied and keep involved in what's happening with them. Emotionally, they cannot leave me.

You've written that some of your happiest experiences in the wild have come when you felt accepted by another animal.
Because we've hunted big animals for so many thousands of years, every single one of them is shy. You'd be able to interact with them close-up if only man's behavior had been different. During this last trip in northern Tibet, a wolf wandered into camp and looked around—he'd probably never seen people before. And that's the way it would be, a sort of Garden of Eden. I used to watch gorillas by climbing low branches of a tree so I could look down on them and they could keep an eye on me. One time a female gorilla climbed up and sat next to me and just looked at me. I remember once in the Serengeti, I was following a cheetah on foot, and she got nervous and moved away from me. Then she went and killed a gazelle fawn, and I lay down near her and moved slowly closer until we were about 10 feet apart, and she simply looked over her shoulder and ignored me because she sensed I wasn't going to harm her.

A lot of the conservation news seems very grim these days. How do you keep going in moments of discouragement?
I don't get up each morning and say, "I've got to save the world, starting with the United States government." I have very specific projects, where I can see progress. And that keeps you going because, in a small way, I see that I can have an influence. And especially if you teach others, and have students and assistants to work with, and can find a way they can continue the work—that's satisfying.

You have said that recent decades have seen a revolution in our relationship with animals as humans overcome cross-species barriers, achieving intimacy with humpback whales, chimpanzees, lions, mountain sheep, wolves, and many others. If the problem for wildlife is no longer ignorance of their plight, what is the major obstacle now?
People may be aware, but it's still peripheral to their minds. If you ask people here, "Should we save the tigers in India?" 95 percent would say yes. But if you ask them, "Should we have mountain lions here in the neighborhood? There's some chance they might eat your dogs," then the answer is, "Oh no, no, no, we don't want them." So people are not willing to sacrifice anything. But that can be changed with proper education. In the end it's the community that will save the environment. Whether you're talking about an African village or Tibetan nomads, basic human attitudes are not that different. People simply have to be stimulated. In countries like China, you can't own the land, but the Buddhist monasteries are setting up sanctuaries that, in effect, become little reserves. I've been to two festivals in a Tibetan province where nomads have come together of their own accord to celebrate and protect wildlife. They'll say: "Oh, our wild yak are
disappearing. We're not going to allow grazing on this mountain range. These flats are for Tibetan antelope." So every community can do this if something stimulates them.

What about steps we can take right here in the United States?
We have an overabundance of everything. I've got two cars sitting in the garage. People must understand that everything they do is an ecological act. How much does it cost to bring grapes here from Chile (pdf)? Not just the grapes, but the fuel spent in carbon emission? If you have a cup of coffee, that means some rain forest in Colombia is being cut down to make coffee plantations. Do you have a cell phone? OK, inside it there's a mineral called coltan, mined mostly in the eastern Congo by a lot of the Rwandans who fled after the genocide, and they're living in the forest, and they're killing gorillas and elephants for meat because they don't have much else to eat. I've got two lights on in here. [Gets up and turns off a light.] I don't need two lights on in here! You know, this is endless.

You're currently involved in the creation of a peace park, a wildlife reserve where Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, and Tajikistan meet. How does that work?
Well, you have the Pamirs, which are broad valleys flanked by mountains extending southward from Russia to Pakistan's borders. You've got Kirghiz nomads, who are very colorful, you've got Marco Polo sheep, you've got snow leopards. The main problem is that you've also got four countries, each with its own political system, its own language, its own history of strife. We managed to get officials from all four countries together in September 2006 in China, and they agreed to work together. But you can't necessarily get definite boundaries and say, "This is a peace park right now." I don't care what it ends up being designated, as long as wildlife is protected. We use the Marco Polo sheep as a symbol because it's a spectacular animal, all countries relate to it, and it's economically valuable. An American hunter will pay $20,000 to $25,000 to shoot one in Tajikistan or China. So the first question is, where does that money go? At least three-quarters of it
ought to go to the local communities so they will see the value of protecting the sheep.

Will poor regions always be disadvantaged in protecting what is theirs?
If a poor country spends most of its money on arms, it doesn't have money for anything else. And it's obvious that the developed countries with quite a bit of money don't spend it on the environment. Right now, when the World Bank makes a large loan to a country, that country must repay it. But how? They ship their food overseas, and the local people don't have that food anymore. Even when grants are provided, the figures can be misleading. You have the United Nations Development Programme and the European Union all giving environmental grants. Yet probably two-thirds of that money goes to foreign consultants. Then the countries have to buy American or European equipment as part of the project. Only a small amount actually goes to help the local people. Until developed countries genuinely care about the rest of the world, things are going to be very difficult.

Is that why you have said that wildlife conservation may ultimately depend on spiritual values?
Can you put a value on a river? On the cry of an animal? Unless you can convince people of the spiritual value of the environment, the cause is lost. Take the Tibetans, who recently began trimming their cloaks with tiger and leopard skins from India because of their new wealth. The Dalai Lama got up and said, "This is against your religion," and the Tibetans stopped wearing skins. So among the Tibetans at least, there's a strong spiritual responsiveness to the environment.
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Tiger caught & hastily released in Sunderbans

It is one of the deadliest creatures on the planet, capable of crunching through limbs with a single bite of its vice-like jaw, but look closely at the face of this majestic – and pregnant – royal Bengal tiger and it appears to be displaying not a deadly gnashing of its glistening teeth, but a triumphant smile.

Read more...

1411 : The countdown begins

Thanks to Prashant for the link to this story.

Only 1,411 tigers remain in the wild in India. That is the stark finding of the National Tiger Conservation Authority's estimation report which was released on Tuesday. The report confirms the worst fears of experts and conservationists—that the national animal is living on the edge, not all that far from a perilous slide to extinction.

Read more here.

The face of a doomed species


Tigers driven to edge of extinction by poachers and loss of habitat
By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi
Published: 31 October 2007
The disastrous impact of poaching and the destruction of the natural habitat of one of the planet's most threatened animals will be made clear tomorrow when the Indian government is told that its remaining tiger population could be as low as 1,300.

The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, will be told that drastic action has to be taken against the two forces threatening the big cat's chance of survival.

"That size of a population is scientifically not viable," said Valmik Thapar, a tiger expert and member of the National Board of Wildlife, which is due to convene in Delhi for a meeting chaired by Mr Singh. "But in the real world you have to try as hard as you can."

Along with the polar bear, the tiger symbolises perhaps more than any other large creature the majesty and power of the natural world. At the same time the tawdry story of the tiger's decline – not just in India but in other countries where it clings on desperately – is a stark indictment of mankind's apparent inability to preserve the natural habitats on which it depends.

No one knows precisely how many tigers are left in India, home to perhaps 80 per cent of the world's remaining animals and which, at the turn of the 20th century, was estimated to have up to 100,000 animals. It is believed there were about 5,000 at the start of the decade.

The most recent census, conducted in 2001 and 2002, put the figure at 3,642. But many experts questioned the way in which that count was handled and a new census was carried out by the government-run Wildlife Institute of India using a more scientifically robust method. While the findings will not be formally announced until the end of the year, preliminary results of the new count have put the population at between 1,300 and 1,500.

"The new figures and facts came as no surprise to conservationists, although the government is still recovering from the shock," said Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, which has several tiger programmes. "In Madhya Pradesh – which is known as the Tiger State – the study has shown a loss of 61 per cent on the figures of the previous tiger census. The state of Maharashtra has shown a loss of 57 per cent."

She added: "In the past census... many tigers were found outside the tiger reserves. The new study shows virtually no tigers outside the tiger reserves."

Experts say the reasons for the decline of the tiger are simple. Not enough is being done to halt the continued poaching of the animals, which are highly prized in China and other parts of east Asia for their pelts and body parts. A tiger skin can fetch up to £5,300 while tiger penises – traditionally believed to have near-magical properties – can fetch £14,000 per kilo.

The tiger has suffered from a loss of its habitat as a result of large-scale mining and hydro-power dam projects. The loss of habitat and prey encourages tigers, pure carnivores, to seize domestic livestock which in turn aggravates local farmers. The tiger is the national symbol but, in the past five years, poachers have been killing them at the rate of one a day, campaigners believe.

Debbie Banks of the Environmental Investigations Agency, a London-based campaign group, said development projects often resulted in the displacement of communities who are left with a choice of moving to the slums of large cities or into the forests. "Living in the forests brings them into conflict with wildlife and the under-resourced, under-trained, ill-equipped forest department staff," she said.

Mr Thapar, 55, who has written 15 books about tigers during three decades working with the animals, has said it would now "take a miracle" to save them. He warned of the impact of the Recognition of Forest Rights Act, a piece of legislation passed last year and expected to become law in the coming months, which grants some of India's most impoverished communities the right to own and live in the forests.

The problem, he said, was that all evidence showed humans and tigers could not co-exist. "If you are not going to set aside habitats where there are no humans then you cannot have tigers," he said.

The decline of the tiger is not isolated to India. In the past century, tiger populations across the world have slumped by 95 per cent and, across a broad chunk of Asia, tigers are now confronting extinction. Indeed, of the nine known sub-species of tiger, three (the Caspian, Javanese and Balinese) are already extinct while another, the South China tiger, is nearing extinction in the wild with perhaps fewer than 30 surviving.

An estimated 4,000 of the South China sub-species – the only one native to central and southern China –roamed the country 50 years ago but its habitat has been dramatically reduced by the country's rapid economic growth and the sub-species was declared officially extinct in 2003. Just this week, the Chinese authorities banned hunting in a mountainous area of Shaanxi province of north-west China where a young South China tiger was apparently sighted by a farmer. The sighting has generated much excitement among conservationists and a team of experts has been set up to conduct a search.

Ms Wright said that, in India, there may now only be two genetically viable populations of Bengal tiger, as the country's sub-species is known. Those live in the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttaranchal and the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, which is said to haveinspired Rudyard Kipling to write The Jungle Book.

There have been the occasional pieces of good news. Last month about 20 tigers were discovered in a mountainous forest range in the western state of Maharashtra from where they were thought to have long disappeared. But among such rare flashes of hope, experts say the evidence of the tiger's ongoing decline have been all too clear. In February 2005, it was revealed all the tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan had been killed by poachers. Meanwhile, the size of the continuing trade in illegal tiger parts has been revealed by activists working undercover in places such as Tibet where there is flourishing business.

A senior official in India's Environment Ministry said tomorrow's meeting would evaluate progress at implementing recommendations made at the last meeting 18 months ago.

"Everyone is waiting for the [official] tiger report – even the Prime Minister," the official told the Asian Age newspaper.

"It is only after the report is tabled that we will get the real picture, which we know is not going to be rosy. We know that we have lost large numbers of our big cats."

http://environment.independent.co.uk/nature/article3112841.ece

How zoo’s tigers were shot for the taxidermist

Lingering death of two caged animals killed so that they could be skinned and stuffed
By Daniel Foggo
See the videos: 1. Zoo tigers are shot for their skins. It is unclear whether they are being killed by Jean-Pierre Gerard, a Belgian taxidermist, or by one of his associates. Warning: shows prolonged sequences of animals suffering

2. One of the shot tigers is skinned by Gerard

A TAXIDERMIST exposed for buying healthy exotic animals from zoos in order to stuff them has been filmed taking part in the brutal slaughter of two caged tigers for their skins.

Jean-Pierre Gerard, who last month offered undercover Sunday Times reporters the pelts of young zoo tigers for £3,000 each, was present while two further specimens from a German zoo were peppered with bullets.

Video footage shows the animals suffering a lingering death as they were repeatedly and inexpertly shot over more than 20 minutes. Afterwards Gerard is shown skinning the animals with a view to their being stuffed. He also confessed on camera to having shot the animals himself, although he subsequently insisted to The Sunday Times that his “friend”, who he would not identify, had actually pulled the trigger.

Gerard has fuelled his lucrative taxidermy business buying surplus animals from zoos across Europe. The footage now suggests that he has also been involved in the death of unwanted zoo animals as well as stuffing them.

Rare captive species are routinely being overbred by zoos, which use cubs to attract visitors in the peak summer season. Later in the year “excess” animals are killed and their skins sold to Gerard for no other reason than the fact that the zoos no longer have any room for them.

Belgian police said this weekend they would like to view the footage and Bart Staes, a Belgian MEP, said he would table questions in the European parliament this week.

The video raises new questions over the provenance of the tiger skins offered for sale to undercover reporters last month. When Gerard offered the skins of two young female tigers for £6,000, he altered official Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) certificates.

He added his name to the certificates, to reassure would-be buyers that he was entitled to sell them. Gerard had bought them from a Belgian safari park, Monde Sauvage.

A Cites document for one of the tigers states that it was actually sold to Gerard when it was still alive, although he insisted yesterday that the animal was dead when he received it. He said he had not examined its certificate properly and therefore did not notice the discrepancy.

The true fate of that tiger is unclear, however. Joseph Renson, the director of Monde Sauvage, at first said the 18-month-old animal had died of old age. He later claimed it had died of natural causes.

The International Species Information System database records that it was “euthanased” in February 2007. Yet in April, Monde Sauvage was issued with the Cites permit stating that it was still alive.

The footage of tigers being shot, which was filmed in 1994 by German television, did not show Gerard’s face or use his name.

But last night he admitted being present when the animals were shot at an address near Antwerp. He described the botched killings as a “catastrophe” that had upset him. Gerard said “a friend” had shot the zoo tigers. The taxidermist admitted he had skinned them but insisted he had been “set up” by the German journalists.

“I thought the tigers were going to be dead already when they were delivered,” he said. Gerard added that he had believed he was going to be given one of the pelts in return for skinning both tigers.

Following the shooting, Gerard admitted on camera that he had shot them himself, but he retracted this in speaking to The Sunday Times, saying that he had been pressured into confessing. “I have never killed any animal for my business,” he said.

However, the producer of the programme, Stefan Eckart, insisted Gerard had indeed shot the tigers himself.

Questions have also been raised about Gerard’s inadvertent role in the fate of a chimpanzee bearing the name of one of the most popular and high-profile residents of a British zoo.

Documents show that Gerard received a chimpanzee with the details of “Rodney”, a long-standing resident of Windsor Safari Park, and offered its skin and skeleton for sale in 2002.

In fact the animal was probably caught in Africa and given Rodney’s details in order to make its purchase appear legal.

The real Rodney lived out his later life at the Monkey World primate rescue centre in Dorset, where he was a featured chimp in the long-running television series Monkey Business. He died in 2005 at the age of 37.

Alison Cronin, who runs Monkey World, said: “This is exactly how wild animals are smuggled, by using the real details of existing captive animals to get them ‘into the system’. It is absolutely appalling that any chimpanzee has ended its days as a trophy for someone who wants a stuffed animal. It shows how low some people can sink.”

Additional reporting: Nicola Smith