The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  “There was a period after these events when I had unpleasant sensations if I went to the forest alone, or saw a tiger track,” Trush explained. “And now, when I see tiger tracks, I still feel fearful and cautious. I don’t believe anyone who says, ‘I’m not afraid of tigers.’ A man must have a sense of fear; it’s only normal. Since then, I have encountered tigers in the forest, but I have never lost self-control. Maybe more encounters lie ahead, God forbid.”

  In 2000, Vladimir Schetinin, Inspection Tiger’s founding chief, was forced into retirement, and with him went much of his hand-picked staff, including Trush. Shortly afterward, Trush’s squad mate, Alexander Gorborukov, committed suicide. Subsequent “reorganizations” at all levels of government have led to staff and funding cuts that have left the agency’s future in doubt. In 2008, Sasha Lazurenko was the only member of the team still affiliated with Inspection Tiger, but since the shake-up in 2000, its power to effectively enforce the law in the forest has been steadily whittled away, and undermined by allegations of corruption under the new chief (he was replaced in 2009). Salaries and morale have diminished accordingly. The current state of things becomes clear after a visit to their offices. When it was first created, Inspection Tiger was based in downtown Vladivostok with the State Committee of Ecology; after 2000, it was banished to the second floor of an obscure housing project, two bus connections and an hour’s travel away.

  “That’s why I left,” said Trush. “That’s why I came to work in a federal national park. Here, we have the status of state inspectors: I have the authority to write a report and follow it through. If I catch someone, I have the authority [as he once had in Inspection Tiger] to push the matter to the very end.”

  Talking to Inspection Tiger’s alumni now is kind of like reminiscing with a successful rock band or sports team that has broken up and fallen on hard times. Those years, 1994–2000, were glory days. They had good training, respectable salaries, high morale, a strong media presence, and real power. With the necessary equipment—uniforms, vehicles, guns, cameras, and fuel—to do their job properly, the public respected them, and so did poachers. They even had a community outreach program through which they visited schools to talk about their work and the importance of a healthy, intact environment (Trush continues to do this). At a time when cynicism and corruption seemed to be the order of the day in Primorye, Inspection Tiger offered an alternative and, for the most part, its members took pride in being part of something that was having a tangible, positive impact on the territory. For many of these men, their work with Inspection Tiger represents one of the best, most empowered moments in their lives. The thought of it, and the demise of it, are bittersweet for Trush, and they elicit strong feelings to this day. But it is clear that what he and his former colleagues are mourning is not simply the job, but their youth. “My only regret,” said Trush, “is that I didn’t get into conservation work ten or fifteen years earlier.”

  Now Trush seems to be making up for lost time. In 2007, two new federal parks were created in Primorye, Zov Tigra (“Call of the Tiger”) and Udegheyskaya Legenda (“Udeghe Legend”). It is strangely appropriate that Trush would have been made the deputy director of Udeghe Legend, and that has been his title since 2008. However, there is currently no salary for this position and so Trush must rely on Phoenix Fund, a Vladivostok-based conservation group affiliated with the Wildlife Alliance in Washington, D.C., which also funds a number of inspection teams throughout Primorye. The park is medium-sized, totaling five hundred square miles*; currently, Trush’s duties are focused on protection and enforcement, the work he loves. In spite of its protected status, a powerful logging company gained access to the Zov Tigra park and ransacked it; they attempted this in Udeghe Legend as well, but Trush intervened. “They thought that if they got caught, they would just pay a bribe and be done with it,” Trush explained. “But the case received good coverage in the media. I must admit I was very pleased. Because they logged in a national park, the fines and damages were five times higher than usual.”

  Trush is an almost relentlessly positive person, and he is exhilarated by this new challenge. “We are truly starting from scratch,” he said. “There is nothing there right now, no buildings or anything, and there is still a lot of lawlessness. We have to do enforcement work in order to create a place for recreation, civilized fishing and hunting in the indicated areas. We also have to create an infrastructure; we have to find a team of people who would be genuinely interested in the job. We have to develop tourism, create an ecological trail system, create ecological education programs, etc. It will all happen.”

  That said, funding remains a serious concern and tigers are still being killed. Some things have changed in Primorye, but one thing hasn’t and that is the hazardous business of dealing with poachers. In November of 2008, Trush was on a raid in the new park when he and his team confronted a group of Nanai poachers, one of whom fired three shots at Trush’s squad mate. The shots missed, and Trush chased the shooter down. He managed to catch him and disarm him, but during the struggle, Trush was stabbed in the hand. Ultimately, he managed to handcuff the man, who turned out to be drunk. Shortly afterward, Trush had a heart attack; in August of 2009, he underwent triple bypass surgery. Trush is nearly sixty, and this kind of high-stress, high-impact field enforcement is a young man’s job. If anything, the working environment is only growing more dangerous, but within weeks of his surgery, Trush was back on patrol in the taiga. “Nature has decided there should be a tiger here,” he said. And Trush’s vocation, as he describes it, is to see that it remains. Summoning a Russian proverb, he added, “Hope dies last.”

  * This refers to shotgun shells, which Onofreychuk claimed would put dogs at risk of getting hit due to the spreading nature of buckshot.

  * In 2009, the park’s areas was reduced dramatically.

  Epilogue

  AS OF 2008, THERE WERE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY tigers living in Primorye, southern Khabarovsk Territory, and their adjacent border regions—down from a postwar high of roughly five hundred in the late 1980s. (By comparison, the state of Texas, a place that has no natural history of tigers, has more than two thousand of them living in various forms of captivity.) This may sound like a lot of tigers, but it is nothing compared to what the wild population was a hundred years ago. At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine, for money, for territory, and for revenge. Looking at distribution maps of tigers then and now is like looking at maps of European Jewry before and after World War II: you simply cannot believe your eyes. It is hard to imagine such a thing is possible, especially when you consider that tigers have accompanied our species throughout its entire history on the Asian continent and have been embraced for their physical, aesthetic, and iconic power. Because of its beauty, charisma, and mythic resonance, the tiger has been adopted as a kind of totem animal worldwide. There is no other creature that functions simultaneously as a poster child for the conservation movement and as shorthand for power, sex, and danger. Like a fist, or a cross, the tiger is a symbol we all understand.

  Of the eight commonly recognized tiger subspecies, three of them—the Balinese, the Javan, and the Caspian—have become extinct in the past two generations, and a fourth, the South China tiger, has not been seen in the wild since 1990. No reliable tiger sightings have been reported from the Koreas since 1991. Today, the tiger has been reduced to isolated pockets of relic populations scattered across the vast territory over which it once roamed freely. Current estimates indicate a total wild population of around 3,200 and falling.

  Making this situation more upsetting, especially for conservationists, is the fact that this cascading trend could be reversed tomorrow. Left alone, with enough cover and prey, there are two things tigers do exceptionally well: adapt and breed. In natur
e, versatility equals viability, and in this, tigers rival human beings. Until around 1940, tigers could be found almost anywhere on the Asian continent from Hong Kong to Iran and from Bali to Sakhalin Island—and at any habitable altitude: tigers have been sighted in Nepal at 13,000 feet, and they are still somewhat common in the semi-amphibious mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans. Nor are they terribly choosy: as long as quantities are sufficient, tigers take their protein where and how they find it. And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another’s territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers take only what they need. This is why, given the choice, many Russian hunters and farmers would rather have tigers around than wolves. The former are much less prone to surplus killing.

  What is happening to tigers now is analogous to what happened to the Neanderthals twenty-five thousand years ago, when that durable, proven species found itself unable to withstand the competitive force and expansion of Homo sapiens and was backed into a corner of southwestern Europe. There would have been a point when their numbers, too, began to visibly shrink, and falter, and finally disappear. There would have been a last one. Many human tribes have met the same fate since then, and many more are meeting it now. Today, it occurs not so much by death as by dilution: through resettlement, religious and economic conversion, and intermarriage, gradually the skills, stories, and languages fade away. Needless to say, once sheltered by a roof, carried in a car, and fed from a can, very few humans willingly return to sleeping on the ground, walking cross-country, and foraging with hand tools. The same is true of tigers: once they have been habituated to zoo conditions, there is no going back. To date, there has been no case of a captive tiger being successfully introduced, or reintroduced, to the wild. Captivity is a one-way trip. There is a poignant irony in this because, at one time or another, all of us have been in the tiger’s situation. The majority of us live how and where we do because, at some point in the recent past, we were forced out of our former habitats and ways of living by more aggressive, if not better adapted, humans. Worth asking here is: Where does this trend ultimately lead? Is there a better way to honor the fact that we survived?

  From a distance, saving wild tigers is an appealing idea, but for many of the people who live alongside them, these animals might as well be members of an enemy tribe. Powerful, frightening, and unpredictable, tigers often represent competition in the quest to meet basic needs, whether it is for timber, game, farmland, or simply peace of mind. What exactly do you say to the cell phone-wielding, Toyota-driving dacha owner when she complains that tigers—tigers!—have eaten all her dogs, and now she’s afraid to walk in the same woods where she used to pick mushrooms with her grandmother? What do you say to the farmer whose cow has just been killed, or to the hunter who believes tigers are scaring away all the game? These are some of the conversations people are having in Primorye in the post-perestroika age—along with why a local masseur is considered a serious candidate for mayor of Vladivostok, when the former mayor will be caught and sent to prison, why bread costs twice as much as it did last year, and how it seems like the Chinese are the only ones willing to work a farm anymore. This is the environment that people concerned about the future of the Amur tiger must work in.

  Meanwhile, across the border in Harbin, the second largest city in Manchuria, one could find—just months before the 2008 Summer Olympics—Tibetan street vendors openly selling the paws and penises of tigers. From where they crouch on the sidewalk, a stone’s throw from the central train station, it is a thirty-minute bus ride to the Harbin Tiger Park. Jammed between an army base, a housing estate, and a railroad line, this euphemistically termed “breeding and rehabilitation center” is one of a dozen or so privately owned factory farms dressed up as theme parks in which tigers are kept and bred like so much livestock. The stated goal of the Harbin Tiger Park is to release these animals into the wild, but one only needs to see these cats’ ineptitude when presented with a live cow to understand that this is impossible. There is virtually no doubt that, eventually, these animals will find their way into the wide variety of folk remedies still sold by many Chinese apothecaries. Whether or not to legalize the breeding of tigers for this purpose is a matter of acrimonious debate. The general feeling among conservationists and those knowledgeable about the industry is that if it is legitimized, the killing of tigers will also be legitimized and products made from “wild” (poached) tigers will become even more highly prized. Furthermore, distinguishing between farmed and wild tigers would be next to impossible.

  The trade in tiger-based products has been officially banned in China since 1993, but it is lackadaisically enforced, and blatant evidence of this greets every visitor to the Harbin Tiger Park: in the center of the ticket lobby stands a huge glass vat filled with “tiger wine.” Immersed in this transparent liquid like a piece of provocative modern art is the full skeleton of a tiger, shreds of flesh still hanging from the bone. Around its feet are strewn more bones from other tigers. Visitors may have some of this morbid elixir decanted for 1,000 yuan (about $140) per liter. It is in the presence of things like this that one can better appreciate Far Eastern Russians’ anxiety and confusion—the feeling that they are perched precariously on the rim of an alien world.

  But as easy and tempting as it is to vilify the trade in tiger-based products, it has a long and honored history in Asia. As the Plains Indians were reputed to have used every part of the buffalo, so, in Asia, is there a use for every part of the tiger. Even the scat was used to treat gastric ailments, and Korean mandarins especially prized robes made with the skins of unborn cubs. This may seem repugnant, but in every culture, the wealthy and, increasingly, the middle class have sought products that are exotic, precious, and rare, often at great cost to the environment. Alligator handbags, tropical woods, waterfront property, caviar, and diamonds are just a few examples of this. In terms of its impact on nature—and on us—our appetite for oil is infinitely more damaging than our appetite for tigers.

  An unanticipated side effect of our ravenous success is that we have found ourselves in charge of the tiger’s fate. This is not a burden anyone consciously chose, but it is ours nonetheless. It is an extraordinary power for one species to wield over another, and it represents a test of sorts. The results will be in shortly. In the meantime, the tiger will not survive as an ornament hung on our conscience. In order to appreciate the true value of this animal—the necessity of this animal—humans need reference points that mesh with their own self-interest. Probably the most compelling of these, beyond the sublime image of a tiger in the wild, is the fact that an environment inhabited by tigers is, by definition, healthy. If there is enough land, cover, water, and game to support a keystone species like this, it implies that all the creatures beneath it are present and accounted for, and that the ecosystem is intact. In this sense, the tiger represents an enormous canary in the biological coal mine. Environments in which tigers have been wiped out are often damaged in other ways as well: the game is gone and, in many cases, the forests are, too.

  A vivid example of what is left behind after the tigers go can be seen from a train window between the Russian frontier and Beijing. Should a passenger turn her attention from the seatback instructional video demonstrating how to make a cell phone lanyard from her own hair, she would see a landscape in which the Marxist vision of nature has been fully realized. With the exception of a swathe of forest along the Chinese-Russian border, what used to be the shuhai—Manchuria’s ocean of trees—has been largely stripped away. Every square yard of arable land appears to have been made useful with a vengeance—scraped
off, plowed up, altered in one way or another. There is virtually nothing left in the way of animal or bird life. A magpie is an event. Every wild thing larger than a rat appears to have been eaten or poisoned. Stunted scrub oak still grows in russet waves on crags above the scoured plain, but down below, as far as the eye can see, spread the works of man.

  Beyond the train window, this anthroscape continues southward until one is about an hour outside Beijing proper. Here the factories start and one passes into a Turneresque “miasm in brown”—part pollution and part dust from the encroaching Gobi Desert. China is the putative birthplace of the tiger and, prior to the advent of communism, Manchuria—the vast area north and east of Beijing—was a source of prime tiger habitat. Today, with the exception of a few transients along the Russian border, it is as barren of tigers as the Gobi. Judging from the highways being built there now, tigers won’t be back any time soon. A Confucian road sign proclaims the new status quo: “Car Accidents Are More Ravenous than Tigers.” But not as ravenous as pollution: in November 2005, a devastating benzene spill in Jilin City, 120 miles south of Harbin, killed virtually everything downstream in the Songhua River. The Songhua is a major tributary of the Amur, and the effects of this catastrophe are still being felt as far away as the Sea of Japan. This is but one of many such accidents, and their impacts reach far beyond the country’s borders.