‘When you catch people it’s already too late’: The mission to save the Malayan tiger
Shah Redza raises his voice over the noise of the motor powering our small taxi-boat into the jungle. “Any messages?” he shouts. “This is the last two minutes we’ll have phone connection.” From a green hut on a slope to the left of us, a soldier waves from an army checkpoint. Around it is rainforest so thick you can barely see a metre inside.
Like other tigers, they are ambush predators, using astonishing eyesight in the dark to hunt early in the morning and at night, particularly around water sources. Apart from the first two years of their lives, when as cubs they stick close to their mother, tigers are basically solitary creatures, roaming mostly within their own territory except when breeding. The oldest adults recorded have lived for more than 10 years while experts believe they can live to as old as 15, perhaps 20.
Ten men were initially signed up in 2019 from Tan Haim, a tiny, primitive village comprising 20 families, which is a 45-minute boat trip into Belum. That number of men grew to 20 last year and now a further 10 are in training at another small settlement along the river. Called Menraq, which means “people” in the Jahai language, the patrollers are unarmed and report the presence of wildlife hunters rather than confront them.
Royal Belum’s size is both a blessing and a curse. It offers a good-sized habitat for the tigers but the activities of intruders are difficult to police. The winding two-lane highway which runs east-west below its southern boundary is a notorious smuggling route from Thailand, and has numerous points from which to enter the extensive forest that connects to the protected area. There are very few people around; the nearest town, Gerik, is a 45-minute drive west.
It’s a trend reflected across Malaysia, where tigers live as far south as Johor, the state that borders Singapore. Habitat loss, including from illegal logging, is also a major contributing factor to the steep decline in non-protected areas. However, poaching, of both the tigers and their prey, such as the samba deer, is the number-one threat, according to Rimau, reducing numbers to a point where there may eventually be too few tigers to reproduce.
“We don’t have that many people living in the jungle,” says Rimau president and documentary filmmaker, Harun Rahman, who is guiding us through Belum with Redza. What is important for us here is we don’t give the animals a reason to actually come out. Most of the time they come out only if there is poaching going on or illegal logging.”
Village head Mak has embraced the project: “The tiger is very important in our tradition. This is our forefathers’ land. We need to look after it.”“The head man was asking me, ‘Do you want some more guys?’ because the more youth who are working as Menraq, the more the village makes,” Redza says. “Among the young boys, the 10-year-olds, they are looking up to these Menraq rangers, saying, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a Menraq.
In late 2020, an adult female and three cubs were spotted by cameras in the Belum-Temengor forest, and the following year, two more cubs were seen., images of three tiger cubs trailing an adult female tiger were snapped on cameras set up by the WWF inside the Belum-Temengor complex, which takes in a mass of jungle below the protected park and is the largest slice of continuous forest in Peninsula Malaysia. The same four tigers were picked up by another camera a month later.
result of the COVID-19 pandemic, have made access to Belum far more difficult. The concern is that the poachers will return as Malaysia begins to open up.
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