{"id":7152,"date":"2018-01-11T08:12:31","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T08:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7152"},"modified":"2018-01-11T08:12:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T08:12:45","slug":"when-a-tiger-walked-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/01\/11\/when-a-tiger-walked-home\/","title":{"rendered":"When a tiger tried to walk home"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Christmas edition of The Economist had a long feature \u2013 A tiger's tale<\/a> \u00a0\u2013 on the plight of the tiger in India today. \u00a0It focused on a 5-year old male \u2013 known as T3 to its minders \u2013 that, in 2009, was shipped from the Pench tiger reserve to the Panna reserve some 650 km to the north. \u00a0Finding things not much to its liking, T3 promptly broke out and set off to walk home. \u00a0The article tells the story of the month-long pursuit of T3 by 70 men and 5 elephants. \u00a0The story had a positive outcome as far as T3 and the Panna are concerned (and the elephants and humans), but the wider story about the tiger's future in India is clearly less positive as the article's ending illustrates:<\/p>\n

\"...\u00a0Panna remains both fortified and fragile. \u00a0India\u2019s human population is still growing, the trade in tiger parts persists. \u00a0The long-term survival of tigers lies in aligning their interests with an improvement of local people\u2019s lives\u2014of being a sight people believe is worth seeing, and which people will come to look at when they can.<\/p>\n

For such magnificence to depend for its future on being instagrammable seems to offend against dignity. \u00a0But what else is there? The obsessively monitored fortresses cannot last forever, and they are hardly the natural habitats they were once believed to be. \u00a0There will always be wildness in the ways of animals\u2014in what they choose, unbidden, to pursue. \u00a0But to seek the natural, in India as elsewhere, must also be to accept that the world of the wild is shared with, and shaped by, humans; to be a human who loves nature is to try and make that sharing work. \u00a0The idea of powerful creatures in the vast untouched wilderness has a sublime thrill to it. \u00a0It also has a certain cosiness; it is the imaginary ideal where many human ideas about nature grew up. \u00a0But as T3 discovered after he swam across the Ken, you really can\u2019t go home again. \u201cThe old world is gone, ... We cannot bring it back.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article has rich detail and is the sort of thing that needs to be read by anyone who wants to understand what (if anything) might realistically be done about conservation where human development conflicts with the wild. \u00a0It might have been written specifically about India and the tiger, but it has applicability much more widely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Christmas edition of The Economist had a long feature \u2013 A tiger's tale \u00a0\u2013 on the plight of the tiger in India today. \u00a0It focused on a 5-year old male \u2013 known as T3 to its minders \u2013 that,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}