Earning Their Stripes

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Aug. 27, 2003 — For 30 years, John Varty has been watching big cats. Not just watching, but observing. Not just observing, but studying. More often than not, he wields a camera while he works. He focused it first on leopards, then on jaguars, cheetahs and lions.

Lately, he's turned his attention to tigers, a critically endangered species that's been circling the drain ever since conservation efforts began in earnest several decades ago. The world's biggest cats are in a downward spiral. Genetic diversity suffers as numbers continue to dwindle; and numbers decrease as the gene pool becomes increasingly impoverished.

Fiercely adaptable, tigers would rebound quickly, agree conservation experts, if left to their own devices. All they need are healthy hunks of habitat chock-full of big prey. But therein lies the problem: The tiger's home turf is Asia. In countries such as India, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Bangladesh, desperate remnant populations of tigers compete to eke out existences on degraded land, sharing scarce water and scarcer prey — namely deer and wild pig — with the most voracious and cunning predator of all: man.

Hundreds of thousands of humans live smack up against land set aside for tiger reserves and sometimes even inside them. Domestic cattle eat the grasses and villagers' eat their game. The tigers have nowhere to go except into the villages, and nothing to eat except cattle and villagers. The tigers are killed by humans in the name of self-preservation (and sometimes vengeance), and they are poached for their bone and pelts, which bring big money on the black market.

Three of the eight subspecies already have gone extinct in the last half-century: the Java, Caspian and Bali tigers. Another, the South China tiger, is all but gone; recently, it was declared extinct in the wild although a small population remains confined in China's zoos.

The world conservation community collectively is working to identify and preserve corridors of wild tiger habitat while relieving the misery of those who live in tiger territory and involving them directly in tiger recovery. It's long, frustrating, dangerous and expensive work, work that'll never be finished, according to John Seidensticker, chairman of the Save the Tiger Fund Council and curator of mammals at the National Zoological Park of the Smithsonian Institution. If it's true that a man can't turn his back on a tiger for fear of attack, it's even truer that he can't ever stop focusing on conserving the cat or it most certainly will blink out.

Which brings us back to filmmaker John Varty, whose focus defies that of the mainstream as he takes a pragmatic if controversial approach to damage control for tigers. His thinking is outside-the-box. His thinking is outside of Asia.

The gist of it is this: In 1999, Varty with his brother, Dave, imported a couple of captive-born Bengal cubs from Cincinnati, Ohio, to their native South Africa. Here, they set about creating the Taj Mahal of tiger sanctuaries. They reclaimed 90,000 over-farmed acres on the banks of the Gariep River and reestablished a forest. They enclosed the land with a big barrier fence. They restocked it with wild game. (As the owners of Londolozi, a 32,000-acre game reserve in South Africa praised by President Nelson Mandela as a model for conservation development, the Varty brothers are no strangers to this part of the business.)

Finally, they introduced the cubs, Ron and Julie, to a small section of the sanctuary. John Varty, with Canadian cat handler Dave Salmoni, took the cubs on walks and taught them to hunt. The hope is that these two tigers someday soon will fend for themselves and ultimately be "wild" enough to raise truly wild cubs within the sanctuary.

These second-and third-generation cats would be candidates for relocation back to Asia. Varty's idea is to export not just tigers, but the entire concept of the sanctuary. His vision is for his tiger sanctuary to serve as a model for similar sanctuaries in Asia. All the better if the genetic contributions of formerly captive tigers can someday prove valuable in increasing the diversity of the wild pool.

At the heart of the project is Varty's and Salmoni's ability to teach captive-born tigers to be "wild." It is a grand — some would argue grandiose — experiment. Others have attempted to do it before and failed.

"If Ron and Julie cannot sustain themselves in this area, then the project's off," Varty says. "It's not a fait accompli. I had said (at the outset) there was a 20 percent chance (of succeeding). Now, I'm 80 percent sure they can sustain themselves. ... It's an experiment that may add to tiger conservation."

Right now, all at the sanctuary are poised and facing a defining moment: The tigers are about to be released into the sanctuary and start fending for themselves without the aid of Varty and Salmoni.

Salmoni has faith in them and in himself. "I learned from Ron and Julie that just because people are saying that something is impossible doesn't mean it is," he says, adding: "I believe that the people telling me that is impossible to train tigers how to hunt were absolutely right. They could never do it. That doesn't mean it is impossible for me."

Ron and Julie are no longer playful, dependent cubs. At 4 years old, Ron is close to 400 pounds and Julie is approaching 300. They know, now, not to be afraid of ostrich as well as the proper technique in taking down a wildebeest — without getting horned. Time and again, they've practiced patience and holding in the bushes when they're itching to pounce.

"Cats instinctively do know how to hunt," Salmoni says, "but taking the step from occasionally making a kill to having successful hunts on a regular basis, that's a big one."

Salmoni has taught and trained the pair for release into the sanctuary as he would athletes for the Olympics. He's convinced they're at their peak in terms of agility, muscle mass and cardiovascular conditioning.

Still, there are no guarantees. "Just yesterday the tigers caught a warthog but it got away," Varty says, explaining that Ron choked on dust kicked up during the struggle and suffered a nasty fall into a hole while negotiating rugged terrain.

Varty plans to monitor the tigers' movements and we'll be with him live, from Sept. 10 through Sept. 18, enjoying a unique and privileged perspective. If you're wondering whether Ron and Julie will earn their wild stripes, come prowl with us.

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