(Myanmar): Making the world safe for big cats

[Guest guest]

Link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0523/p20s01-sten.html

 

Making the world safe for big cats Explorer Alan Rabinowitz creates havens

for tigers, jaguars, and leopards. *By Tibor Krausz* | Correspondent of The

Christian Science Monitor

 

 

BANGKOK, THAILAND - Alan Rabinowitz was on a routine mission deep inside a

Burmese jungle when news reached him about the attack. In a nearby camp of

rattan gatherers a juvenile elephant had just been set upon by a tiger. The

intrepid wildlife expert from New York decided to investigate.

 

Sure enough, the still-jittery elephant calf had rake-style claw marks on

its flank. Mr. Rabinowitz peeled off from his obligatory government escort

to track the attacker. Near a bank of thick undergrowth, he had " a gut

feeling, " he says. " I was looking at the jungle and sensed a presence in

there watching me. I don't think it was intuition; it was knowing my animal

so well. "

 

He threw a rock into the tall grass. Suddenly there was a mighty rustle,

followed by the receding sound of a large animal sprinting through the

forest. Closer inspection revealed the fresh pug marks (paw prints) of a

tiger having lain in wait.

 

Rabinowitz was relieved – but not for the reason you or I would have been:

He was glad the tiger was there. " When we start bringing the number of

tigers up, " he says, " they're bound to have run-ins with people. " And that's

great, he adds, because friskier tigers may testify to a beleaguered species

on the rebound – even if that causes problems for villagers in the area.

 

" I didn't go to Myanmar [burma] to help people, " says Rabinowitz, director

of science and exploration for the Wildlife Conservation Society based at

the Bronx Zoo who recently passed through Bangkok, after spending two months

in Myanmar. " I went there to save tigers. "

 

And save them he does. Ironically, though, that invariably entails helping

people. Take Ah Puh, a Lisu hunter expert at trapping tigers in remote

northern jungles of Burma. The area is populated by impoverished ethnic

minorities who often exchange exotic animal parts with Chinese traders for

their most prized commodity: salt.

 

As recently as the 1980s, dozens of tigers were poached every year in

Burma's forests; today, only around 80 remain, Rabinowitz says. They, too,

are doomed, he adds, unless locals like Ah Puh endorse his message of

wildlife conservation.

 

So, hiking into backwoods hamlets, he told tribesmen (through interpreters)

about the long-term ecological benefits of livestock husbandry over

traditional ways of hunting. He then gave them fast-breeding piglets.

 

" Turns out pigs there can't just wallow in their filth like back home

because they get killed by parasites, " he notes. " But now locals know how to

raise pigs in the jungle. As do I. "

 

Loath to tell hand-to-mouth hunters never to stalk game at all, he brought

slides and printed posters to showcase endangered species: the Asiatic black

bear, the clouded leopard, the sambar ( an Asiatic deer).

 

Ah Puh was among the persuaded, Rabinowitz says. Having traded in his

crossbow and poison arrows, the Lisu man now earns a living helping the

American's locally recruited team of wardens to pinpoint sites for the

infrared ray-triggered cameras that monitor tigers.

 

" One of our wardens just reported seeing a mother with two cubs, " Rabinowitz

says cheerfully.

 

That's solace enough, he suggests, when facing his critics who often don't

approve of his tactics in conservation. Human rights advocates, for example,

accuse him of being a dupe of Burma's repressive military regime.

 

Built like Rambo, with ruggedly handsome features, Rabinowitz has the

storybook look of an explorer. His talisman is a jade sun god pendant from

Mayan temple ruins that he stumbled upon in Belize's Cockscomb Basin, where

he tracked jaguars and set up the world's first reserve for the spotted cats

in 1984. He has other physical mementoes – including a boxer's nose – from a

litany of adventures, including a crash landing in the jungle.

 

The dashing figure that Rabinowitz cuts is at odds with his Brooklyn

childhood. A stutterer, he was the target of playground ridicule. To fend

off tormentors, he began lifting weights and taking boxing lessons at age

10. Between kindergarten and sixth grade, he says, he stopped talking

altogether. To people, that is. After school, he'd lock himself in his room

and pour his heart out to his pet turtles, hamsters, and gerbils. " I made a

promise that if I ever got my voice, " says Rabinowitz, who still

occasionally stutters slightly, " I'd use it to try to save animals. "

 

He has. Rabinowitz studied jaguars in Belize, clouded leopards in Taiwan,

and Indo-Chinese tigers in Thailand. In all three countries he established

pioneering nature reserves for big cats.

 

" Alan has done a tremendous job in conservation, " says George Schaller, a

legendary naturalist who launched Rabinowitz on his career in the 1980s

while the young biologist was studying black bears and raccoons in

Tennessee's Smoky Mountains. " He's very focused and dedicated, working

toward what needs to be done with local people, officials, donors,

scientists, and whoever can help. "

 

During his recent Burma visit, Rabinowitz trekked to the remote hamlets of

Lisu, Dawang, and Kachin tribespeople around the Hukawng Valley Wildlife

Sanctuary. Rabinowitz had been key in convincing Burma's secretive and

intractable government to set aside the land in 2001. A triangular wedge

between northeastern India and southwestern China, it's the linchpin of his

conservationist masterpiece – the Northern Forest Complex. Exceeding the

size of Maryland, it links four protected biodiversity hot spots.

 

His work hasn't endeared him to human rights campaigners. Burma is a pariah

state under international sanctions thanks to its government, which jails

pro-democracy activists, oppresses citizens, and engages in the ethnic

cleansing of its minority populations. Advocacy groups like the US Campaign

for Burma, which calls for the complete isolation of the country, accuse

Rabinowitz of providing the government with an excuse to further dispossess

minorities by appropriating their lands under the pretext of creating a

wildlife reserve.

 

A new report, " The Valley of Darkness, " from the Bangkok-based Kachin

Development Networking Group insists that the Hukawng Valley Wildlife

Sanctuary is an environmental mess. In the previously isolated valley, the

report claims, roads and bridges built by the government have facilitated a

major gold rush that has destroyed forest and rivers and caused social

turmoil among minorities.

 

By implication, Rabinowitz is an unwitting accomplice. Not so, he counters.

Corrupt officials don't need him as cover to exploit natural resources; they

can do that anyhow. Rather, he argues, it's his trademark brand of

relentless, on-the-ground engagement that may stop both the government and

locals from full-scale despoliation. In conservation, he says, " you take

whatever you can get under whatever conditions are mandated. I have a job to

do – save an ecosystem. "

 

And that's hard enough as it is. Rabinowitz discovered this year that since

his last visit to Burma two years ago, two land concessions – 300 square

miles each – had been granted to tapioca and sugar-cane growers inside the

sanctuary's putatively inviolable interior. So off he stormed to the

country's new capital, Naypyidaw, a secluded bunker-barracks of a town built

by the nation's generals. " I was furious, " Rabinowitz says. " If I'm gonna

raise millions of dollars and risk my reputation, then the government has to

show me it means business, too. "

 

Officials blamed the concessions on an oversight. So he returned to the

valley to coax a promise from the concession's beneficiary, a local Kachin

developer, not to encroach unnecessarily on wildlife.

 

Rabinowitz remains relentless. He'd hardly emerged from the Burmese jungles

before he flew to Brazil, where he's working on another project – the

establishment of a " genetic corridor " for jaguars from Mexico to Argentina.

He aims to combine intact forests with the edges of nearby cultivated land

so that the roving predators can pass undisturbed along the entire distance

between the South American and lower North American continents.

 

" While everyone's declaring gloom and doom for big cats, " Rabinowitz

insists, " I say we can still save them. "