India: Loving our tigers to death

Rupa Sengupta

The Times of India

“Tiger tourism” bears the seeds of its own destruction, said Rupa Sengupta. “Yes, we love to look at untamed animals,” and if there’s money to be made doing it, so much the better. The problem is that looking at tigers is not an innocent activity.

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Travel companies that hawk “tiger tours” must deliver sightings of wild tigers to their customers, and they go to drastic lengths to ensure encounters. Some of them lead convoys of jeeps or even elephants deep into tiger country, “damaging grasslands” and causing a “loss of precious habitat.” Hotels and lodges catering to tiger tourists have been built directly on “tiger corridors.” These hotels attract not only the tour groups that follow licensed guides, but also “unsupervised tourists” who “harass the big cats and disperse their prey.”

Wildlife officials have been pleading for years to close off India’s tiger reserves to protect the fewer than 1,400 tigers that remain, and last month, the National Tiger Conservation Authority was poised to do so. But after howls of protest from the powerful tourism lobby, the conservation board backed down. Tour operators argued that their activities actually benefit tigers, since much of the profits from tiger tourism goes toward conservation. But where will their profits be in a few years, when there are no more tourists—because there are no more tigers?