| What led you
in the direction of wildlife?
I grew up in New York City, and didn’t know much about
animals. Throughout my childhood, I had a severe stutter.
People didn’t know what to think about me. My parents
tried to explain to my teachers that I was normal, but they
felt I was disruptive. People who stutter can often speak
normally to animals. During my childhood, I’d come home
from school each day and go into a little closet with my chameleons,
turtles, and other small pets, and I would ‘talk’
to them. But as soon as I stepped out of the closet, I was
incoherent. So as a kid, I made a promise to the animals.
I felt so close to them because I realised that we had something
in common – that animals have feelings and desires and
needs, as I did, but they couldn’t talk either. I swore
to my pets and other animals that if I ever found my voice,
I would try to be their voice. When I was in college, I finally
found a clinic that helped me to speak. By that time though,
I realised that what I really cared about was being with animals
and in the wild. So I worked towards getting a Ph.D in wildlife
biology, studying bats and bears in the Smoky Mountains in
Tennessee. It was at the end of my studies, in 1982, that
I met Dr. George Schaller for the first time. When he asked
if I would be interested in going to Belize to study jaguars,
I said yes, of course! I didn’t even know where Belize
was at the time.
Were your two years in Belize formative for you?
Very formative. I was told to go into the rainforest, in the
Cockscomb basin, where Mayan Indians live, with no help, to
trap and put radio collars on jaguars, and study them. Nobody
had done this in the rainforest before. George (Schaller)
had caught jaguars in the Pantanal wetlands in South America
with snares. Before using traps, I first tried to catch and
radio-collar a jaguar the way many hunters did, by treeing
it with dogs. During my first attempt, a man was bitten by
a venomous snake, and died. I also narrowly survived a small
plane crash while tracking cats. The jungle taught me that
I was not invincible, and that if I continued to fight it,
I would die. It was a good thing. My years in Belize set the
stage for my subsequent work. They shaped my personality and
confirmed for me that this was really the life I wanted.
In just two years, you managed to convince the Government
of Belize to establish the world’s first jaguar preserve.
Back at that time, the work wasn’t about conservation.
We were focussed strictly on science. I had been hired to
go study jaguars and then leave Belize. But I couldn’t
because the jaguars were being killed. Now it seems commonplace,
but back then I was in a country where the field of conservation
biology didn’t exist. Belize didn’t have a single
national park at the time. This was a country with 80 to 90
per cent jungle and lots of jaguars. I decided, though, that
I should try to convince the Prime Minister that he should
save a piece of jungle for jaguars. It seems easy enough now
to explain to people that if you don’t protect wilderness,
it will disappear, but back then you had to really look into
the future to see what was coming down the road. I’m
happy that I managed to convince the Government to establish
the world’s first jaguar preserve.
Belize is now a major eco-tourist destination, and it was
the establishment of the Cockscomb Jaguar Preserve that launched
the whole tourism industry.
Now you’re working on a contiguous corridor for jaguars?
Yes. I run a Big Cat Programme here at WCS. There are two
big projects that I’m trying to make a success, and
they’ll probably keep me busy for the rest of my life.
One is setting up what will probably be the world’s
largest tiger reserve, Hukawng, a 23,301 sq. km. area in northern
Burma. The other, even bigger challenge, is establishing a
contiguous genetic corridor for jaguars from Mexico to Argentina.
What are the obstacles?
Human beings, politics. Of course, people are also the solution.
The fact is that people are part of the whole environment.
Many people say poverty is the main obstacle to protecting
wilderness, but it’s not. It’s often more difficult
to establish Protected Areas in wealthier countries than in
poorer ones. It’s greed that is the primary obstacle
to conserving species – what the Buddhists call the
“hungry ghost realm”. It’s very hard to
fight it. One of our biggest challenges in Asia right now
is the trade in wildlife parts, specifically tigers, for Traditional
Chinese Medicines. The trade is booming because China is a
booming economy and more people have money. It’s the
increasing wealth that’s driving it.
You’ve studied cats in Central and South America,
and all over Asia – why have you focussed on big cats?
I didn’t work to protect the Cockscomb Jaguar Preserve,
just to save jaguars. I did it to save a big, beautiful rainforest.
It’s easy to “sell” the protection of big
cats to governments. For me, though, it’s about saving
a whole, huge, intact system, with the people inside, showing
that people and wildlife can live in harmony. It’s the
same with the Hukawng Valley, in Burma, there are Asian elephants,
clouded leopards, all sorts of fantastic animals! It’s
got incredible butterflies and orchids and ants. I think about
them too. But I can’t go to a government and say, give
me this for the ants! They’re not going to give me anything
for the ants, or the butterflies. Or even for the turtles,
even though they are the most endangered animals in Asia.
So you save the large areas of wilderness that tigers need,
and then all the other species get saved too.
What was it like to discover the leaf deer Muntiacus putaoensis?
That was a highlight of my life. I wasn’t looking for
it. It’s almost unheard of, discovering a new mammal,
so to just stumble on one was amazing. To just chance upon,
not only a new species, but the smallest, most primitive deer
in the world, was wonderful. The leaf deer is a living fossil,
the missing link in deer evolution. Studying it is helping
scientists to see how and why, not only deer, but mammals
evolved from solitary into social animals, from having long
canines into having just chewing teeth. It’s still alive
back up there in Northern Burma! I get furious at people who
give up when something goes wrong, and say the struggle’s
lost, we’ve failed. Should you say to young people,
don’t try, don’t fight, don’t work for what
you can get? You’ve got to keep fighting.
What does the future hold for tigers in India?
Indira Gandhi, the late Prime Minister of India, did just
what India needed at the time – she said that India
had to save tigers and protect wilderness at all costs. But
then, when tiger numbers began to rebound, the government
should have moderated its approach. But it didn’t, and
the growing perception that tigers were being given higher
priority than people created an ongoing backlash against tigers
that is very hard to fight.
The Tribal Bill is part of that backlash, isn’t
it?
Yes. The situation is so complicated. Even politicians who
don’t love wildlife are not going to want their biggest
predators wiped out under their watch. Losing tigers in India
would mean losing a major economic input. But
I don’t see a big future for tigers in India. Unless
the government goes back to a larger landscape concept in
terms of preserving tigers and other wildlife, the future
is bleak. India’s wildlife is isolated in very small,
fragmented pockets. Tigers will probably continue to exist,
but not in
a truly wild sense, they’ll hang on in what could be
called “mega-zoos,” where you might have to artificially
ensure continued genetic diversity in the remaining population,
and tourists will come in jeeps to view highly- habituated
animals.
What is your view on the role of the World Bank?
The World Bank (WB) is too big. It’s hard to direct,
but if you can steer it, it can be powerful and effectual.
I backed a WB dam project in Laos, because if the WB didn’t
back the dam, it was going to be built anyway by the Koreans,
the Thais or the Chinese. All they cared about was making
money from Laos. The Bank did guarantee a million dollars
per year from the dam toward the Protected Area and
local people. The Bank does some horrendous things, it’s
a big environmental destroyer sometimes, even when it claims
to be doing the right thing. It has a very bad record in India.
On the other hand, there are not that many groups that bring
that level of money to the table that care at all about the
environment. Some people who criticise the Bank don’t
say anything about unaccountable corporations like Exxon,
or Microsoft, because there’s nothing they can do about
them, even though they have a horrific impact on the environment.
What would you say to a young field biologist who
feels that science is everything, and conservation is unimportant?
Conservation without science is very, very weak conservation,
and then often wrongly guided. But if field biologists stop
at the science, and don’t carry it further into conservation,
they’re doing a gross injustice to what they’re
working on. Many people want to see themselves
just as academic or traditional scientists, but it’s
your responsibility, as far as I’m concerned, in your
papers, lectures, books, to take that one step further and
inform others how the subject of your study can be protected.
You’re the best person to play that advocacy role. Doing
less than that is selfish and irresponsible, frankly.
Do you feel that the role of women is expanding in field biology
and wildlife conservation, or that they have a particular
role to play in the future?
There are more women in the field now. There’s nothing
a woman can’t do. I’ve seen many more men have
emotional breakdowns in this field, from being alone, and
the difficulty of it, than women. In Why Big, Fierce Animals
are Rare, Paul Colinvaux describes how species stay within
their niché, with the exception of human beings, who
occupy and overflow every niché.
Is there any hope for the planet with a species that
doesn’t seem to recognise that it needs to set limits
for itself, to share?
I think that “recognition” and “sharing”
are the two key words. Environmental education of young people
is crucial. We need to get to a point where we don’t
have to think of sharing, or think of recognising, because
thinking about it already means you’ve set yourself
apart from nature. We need to get to a point where doing that
is simply inconceivable, because we view ourselves as part
of nature. Living in the world with animals must be a given,
and anything less would be equivalent to our world ending
as we know it.
Let’s return to animals. Would you tell me about an
exciting encounter you’ve had in the wild?
At the end of my years in Belize in the early 1980s, just
before I left to work on clouded leopards in Asia, I went
into the jungle one last time. I didn’t expect to see
a jaguar, but before long, I found huge tracks, the biggest
I had ever seen. Although I knew my chances of seeing this
cat were small, sometimes you’re lucky. So I followed
the tracks deeper into the forest, going on for several hours
until it began to get dark. I didn’t have a flashlight,
and I didn’t want to be in the jungle after dark without
one. So I turned around to begin the long hike out. And not
4.5 m. behind me was the jaguar. This jaguar that I had been
tracking had circled around behind me, and had been following
me! Jaguars are so curious, all big cats are. At first, I
didn’t feel scared because it was such a shock. I realised
I should make myself look smaller, so I squatted down, expecting
the jaguar to just turn away. But the jaguar sat down. I found
myself looking into its eyes. Anybody who ever thinks that
a zoo animal is like a wild animal has never seen a wild one
up close, especially a big cat. The power, the wildness, and
the fire, you could just see it in its eyes, so different
from a captive animal. After about 15 or 20 seconds I thought,
I should be scared. This jaguar could kill me. So I actually
got a little scared. I got a lot scared! I stood up, and stepped
back. I shouldn’t have moved so quickly. The jaguar
jumped up. But it wasn’t going to attack me. It just
turned and started walking into the jungle. Just before it
left the trail, it turned, looked at me again, and walked
away.
That was one of the most incredible experiences with an animal
I’ve ever had. It was almost this incredible good-bye.
But it was more than that. As a kid, when I stuttered so badly,
I always asked my father to bring me to the Bronx Zoo, to
the big cat house. They had one old jaguar and several tigers.
At that time in my childhood, I felt very broken inside, very
hurt. And the zoo animals looked very hurt, too. The old zoo
cages were just concrete and bars, and I thought, what did
this huge animal do to get there? When I met that jaguar in
the forest just before I left Belize, I felt like my life
had come full circle, from those early days of a broken animal
in the zoo and a broken me, to me in the wild and the animal
in the wild, and both of us strong and free.
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