Is the crisis in India beyond salvaging?
India is a prime example of conservation gone wrong. The outward reason is that there's just tons of poaching. Indian parks are probably the best-protected areas in all of Asia. I've never been to any other place in Asia where the guards are so well-trained, where they're armed to the teeth, where they're allowed to shoot to kill the poachers. And yet they're losing! Poaching by local people is nothing new. But the reason it's been so devastating in India is because the places that were protected were basically postage stamps. They're all very, very small protected areas—150 square kilometers, 260, 600—all tiny areas for tigers. The largest tiger reserve in the world, which I set up in the Hukaung Valley in Burma, is 8,500 square miles—over 23,000 square kilometers. It's nearly the size of the state of Vermont. Flowing over into India, it's close to 10,000 square miles. It's huge. But it's got very few tigers left; we've got to bring them back now. If we bring them back we're going to have areas where the tigers can roam.
You bring tigers back into the Indian parks, they can go extinct very quickly, as just happened in Sariska and is happening in many of the Indian tiger reserves. But even if you have a very good, stable park with lots of tigers, like Nagara Hole, which has some of the best tiger densities in the world, the fact is it's tiny. The tigers don't have anyplace to go. Our plan is to expand outward and actually try to hook up protected areas so that tigers don't go into a sink.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/135050/page/2
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