To save the majestic big cats, a Tiger Summit was held in November last year, the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar.
Now, just over a year since the much-hyped Tiger Summit in St Petersburg, conservationists see pockets of hope while taking stock. But all agree that much, much more needs to be done on the ground.
The summit itself was supposed to be a 'game changer' in bringing heads of government and top officials to the table, along with conservation organisations and the World Bank. The 13 'tiger range' countries committed to an ambitious goal: doubling the number of tigers in the wild by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger.
To meet that target, much has to be done to address two major threats that could drive tigers to extinction - poaching and habitat loss.
Restoration of lost habitat 'corridors', which would enable isolated remnant tiger populations to link up, is critical if the animals are to breed and raise their numbers.
As it is, viable tiger populations - those with sufficient numbers of both sexes to breed - are thought to no longer exist in China, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Elsewhere, Thailand is thought to have between 250 and 300 tigers left in the wild. Malaysia may have up to 500, but they are under severe threat from poachers.
Indonesia, which lost the Balinese tiger in the 1950s and the Javan tiger in the 1970s, has about 400 Sumatran tigers left. India officially has up to 1,700 tigers, but independent conservationists believe the number is closer to 1,200.
Linking up forest 'corridors' is a complex and tedious business. In most cases, human populations need to be moved - a process that is under way in some areas but invariably takes years.
Meanwhile, protection is critical if the tiny pockets of remaining tigers in the wild are not to be wiped out. And this is where the battle becomes truly difficult. 'It's painfully clear that the poachers... are getting more efficient,' Dr William Schaedla, the regional director for Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, noted four months ago, after a dozen illegal snares were discovered in the jungles of Perak, Malaysia.
'This begs obvious questions about whether the enforcement authorities are managing to keep pace with the criminals. Sadly, it appears they are not,' he said.
The foot soldiers of tiger protection are poorly paid, face formidable odds and work in hazardous conditions.
A case in point: Forest ranger Sommai Chidchai, 29, was patrolling in Thailand's Pang Sida National Park in June when he tripped a wire connected to a loaded rifle hidden in the bushes. The weapon - meant to kill wildlife - went off, sending a bullet through his leg.
Urgent need to save last breeding grounds.
He was initially given just US$16 (S$20) in compensation by the Thai government. After non-governmental organisation (NGO) Freeland Foundation gave him US$160, the government raised the compensation to the same amount.
Rangers like Mr Sommai are often raw 20-somethings who have to brave leeches and mosquitoes, driving rain and the scorching sun while on patrol for days on end. When they come across a poacher, he could be a harmless village lad out to get a wild boar or a battle-hardened former soldier armed with an automatic rifle out to shoot a tiger.
Rangers protect hundreds of square kilometres of forest land, but they are paid only US$100 to US$160 a month, with no medical scheme or insurance.
'The importance of wildlife and ecosystem protection is simply not acknowledged in their financial remuneration,' said wildlife conservation veteran Belinda Stewart-Cox, in Thailand. 'The message this conveys is that these guys are right at the bottom of the pile.'
NGOs like the Freeland Foundation sometimes step in to help, offering training and funding for equipment.
Mr Tim Redmond, a member of Freeland, believes more could be done officially: 'Some of the (forest protection staff) we work with are earning the same amount they did 20 years ago. There are no allowances to buy food or petrol unless an NGO supports them. They have GPS (Global Positioning System) sets and no money to buy batteries.
'Having said that, they are often good guys, and proud of what they do.'
With all its problems, Thailand is still ahead of its neighbours Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar in tiger conservation. In these three countries, the pay is even lower and resources even harder to come by.
There is also added pressure from land-clearing and development, which has accelerated at a rapid pace in the past five years in Cambodia, said Phnom Penh-based Matthew Maltby, a projects officer for the NGO, Fauna & Flora International.
A paper in the journal PLoS Biology in September last year noted: 'Strategies to save the tiger must focus first and foremost on protecting... remaining concentrations of tigers.'
The paper identified 42 'sources sites' with viable breeding populations.
'The immediate priority must be to ensure that the last breeding populations are protected and continuously monitored,' said the authors - wildlife biologists and conservationists from several countries, including Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Thailand. 'Without such protection, all other efforts are bound to fail.'
But protection - with its neverending vigilance against poachers - is an exercise marked by difficulties and setbacks.
India has dozens of tiger reserves, but in recent years, two - Sariska in Rajasthan state and Panna in Madhya Pradesh state - had all their tigers wiped out by poaching gangs.
The reason: Protection is often patchy. Mr Ravindra Juyal, who is in charge of Ramnagar forest division on the fringes of Corbett Tiger Reserve, said his staff sometimes do not have the money to buy diesel for their jeeps to mount patrols on his patch.
Clearly, funding is a problem. According to one estimate, at least US$5 million to US$6 million is spent every year on tigers by conservation organisations.
But often, the money is spread thinly over too many areas. Governments spend more but bureaucracies are often inefficient and corrupt, and the money that reaches the field, where it truly matters, is sometimes barely enough.
Ms Debbie Banks, a tiger campaigner with London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, pointed out that 'a wildlife department needs to be made up of committed, trained and well-resourced officers who see protection as a priority and have the skills to fight crime'.
'I'd question whether the forest service of many tiger range countries is set up to do that,' she said.
As for punishment, the problem has long been in ensuring successful prosecution, even if efforts are being made to stiffen the penalties. In India, the punishment is five to seven years in prison, but fewer than 20 people have been convicted of killing a tiger.
On a brighter note, determined protection efforts do work. In north-east India, Kaziranga National Park has a high density of tigers because its wildlife department protects the reserve with fierce dedication. Kaziranga has an area of 430 sq km with 65 to 70 tigers. Another tiger reserve, Buxa, also in India's north-east, is almost twice as large but has half the number of tigers. In Buxa, protection is weak and poaching for wildlife as well as forest produce is rampant.
The big cat is resilient and breeds well with enough pristine habitat and prey. In Thailand, the existence of tigers was recently confirmed in Thap Lan National Park, where there was previously thought to be virtually none.
But with tiger numbers so low and many small populations isolated from one another, it is possible that if they do not recover, and if remnant populations are killed off by poachers, the big cat may be extinct in the wild in a decade or two.
Activists worry that while the Tiger Summit may have raised global awareness of the problem, the pledges made by the parties involved are not binding.
Official resources are inadequate to the task, and things have not gone further downhill only because of the efforts of various NGOs.
So, a year on, the tiger's future still hangs by a thread.
Freeland's Mr Redmond observed recently that 'tigers in South-east Asia have survived this long because they fear everything. They sneak around'.
A sad state of affairs for one of nature's most fearsome predators.
Source: by Nirmal Ghosh, Thailand Correspondent, Bangkok.
