Nepal’s leader says it has too many tigers. Does it?

Nepal has received praise around the world for having tripled its tiger population in a generation, but Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli believes the nation may have been too powerful.

” In such a small country, we have more than 350 tigers … We can’t have so many tigers and let them eat up humans”, he said last month at an event organised to review the country’s COP29 outcomes.

According to government data, tiger strikes in 2019 and 2023 claimed nearly 40 life and injured 15 others. However, regional residents claim that the number is significantly higher.

” For us, 150 cats are enough”, Oli declared in December, actually suggesting that Nepal may take its prized great cat to other countries as products.

There is no one truth, authorities say. It depends on the availability of prey in a given area- hopefully, each cat should be in the region of about 500 victim animals, such as deer, antelopes or outrageous buffalo, tiger biologist Ullas Karanth says.

Specialists argue that Oli’s problem with capping cat numbers is misplaced. Instead, Dr. Karanth recommends that Nepal’s government concentrate on “extending protected areas that have fair natural concentrations of victim and tigers.”

If wildlife is evicting prey from shielded areas, it may explain why tigers have generally attacked humans in areas that border forests.

An example is the “buffer areas” that lie between federal gardens and human settlements. Visitors frequently visit the area for cattle-grazing and collecting feed and wood, but wildlife sightings are popular around.

As yet another battlefield, forest corridors have emerged, creating new types of land that connect various gardens and bioreserves and allowing wildlife to roam between them. Bridges often run through these places, and visitors also use them for foraging, leaving them vulnerable to problems.

The rise in human mortality is a signal that Nepal’s once-successful protection unit is cracking, scientist Karan Shah says.

” So far ,]Nepal’s ] focus seems to be on winning international attention, while ignoring the impact on communities living around national parks and protected areas”, Mr Shah adds.

He contends that protection is” an ecological or academic issue” as well as a social one, and that the loss of human life must be avoided so that local communities can continue to support the restoration effort and resist turning against it. Local angst is also growing because lions have been consuming animal.

According to Thakur Bhandari, chairman of Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal,” a significant portion of our population also lives in remote areas and is dependent on forest resources that they help preserve.”

We can’t be against animals as forest conservationists, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ignore its effects on people and our society.

A decade earlier, some 100, 000 cats roamed Asia- but forest and rampant hunting pushed them to the brink of extinction. There are now only about 5, 600 wild cats remaining across 13 states, including Nepal, China, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Russia.

Nepal was the first country to accomplish the goal, in part because of a zero-poaching effort and a doubled in the government’s forest cover between 1992 and 2016. All of these countries had committed to double their cat statistics by 2022.

Forest corridors that were created by connecting 16 protected areas in southeastern Nepal with those in north India crossed the border.

The increase in lion strikes has today tarnished that success.

Oli thinks Nepal’s cat population is growing at the cost of human existence. Sustainable options, however, are never easy to come by.

The parks and wildlife office in Nepal has acknowledged the difficulty of keeping track of tigers because those responsible for human homicide are found and taken into captivity.

In a conservation record that was released in 2023, the ministry claimed that “problem tigers are already being populated by rescue centers and parks.” ” A detailed protocol is urgently needed to cope with the evacuation, handling, and treatment of issue animals”.

Oli has proposed sending Nepal’s cats worldwide.

Why not lions, as people love to keep pets like falcons and peacocks? he suggested. That would also improve their position, they said.

Some have different thoughts.

Tigers, according to Dr. Karanth, should be “killed quickly” if they have repeatedly claimed human lives. Some claim that humans have exacerbated the issue by encroaching into the tigers ‘ natural habitats, using the land for agriculture or infrastructure, and reducing the big cats ‘ prey-base.

The BBC spoke to a wildlife management analyst, however, who claims Oli wants to bring down cat numbers so that more territory may be cleared to build facilities.

” It is not about people’s safety”, he said.

For then the scenario is at an impasse. It’s unclear whether Oli’s “tiger politics” proposal may gain momentum, or whether over-encroaching humans or tigers are to blame for Nepal’s lion attack problems.

What is clear is that Nepal’s struggle to coexist peacefully with humans and tigers, and the country’s success story has brought many of its own thorny issues to bear with.