Who is killing the tiger Panthera tigris and why?

Abstract

We investigated the range of people involved in killing tigers Panthera tigris in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, their motives and methods, and their links to the commercial trade. Using snowball sampling we conducted  qualitative interviews with local people. We identified five categories (village residents, poachers, shikaris, trappers and pirates), each with different motives, methods and networks. Village residents kill tigers predominantly for safety, whereas others kill in the forest professionally or opportunistically. Poachers kill tigers for money, but for others the motives are more complex. The motives of local hunters are multifaceted, encompassing excitement, profit, and esteem and status arising from providing tiger parts for local medicine. Pirates kill tigers for profit and safety but also as a protection service to the community. The emerging international trade in tiger bones, introduced to the area by non-local Bangladeshi traders, provides opportunities to sell tiger parts in the commercial trade and is a motive for tiger killing across all groups.

The Allure of the Illegal: Choice Modeling of Rhino Horn Demand in Vietnam

“…Poaching remains a critical threat to the survival of many species worldwide, including tiger and rhino (Milliken & Shaw 2012;Saif et al 2016). The global conservation community, working through international bodies such as CITES, is committing significant resources to the fight against poaching as well as demand reduction measures (CoP16; Decision 16.85, 2013).…”

Attitudes of Social Media Users Toward Mountain Lions in North America

“…Internet questionnaires were disseminated periodically on Twitter during a 49‐day period (26 December 2017 to 16 February 2018) via snowball sampling (Sadler et al 2010, Saif et al 2018). The survey emanated from an individual author's Twitter account, with information about the survey, its intent, and links to the survey provided, along with an image associated with each tweet.…”

Using crime script analysis to elucidate the details of Amur tiger poaching in the Russian Far East

“…Studies have examined the last link of the poaching supply chain: the domestic markets in China (Moyle, 2009;Van Uhm, 2016;Van Uhm & Wong, 2019;Wong, 2016) and Nepal (Karmacharya et al, 2018). The first link, including the range of people involved, their motives and methods, and associated links to the commercial trade, have been examined in Bangladesh (Inskip et al, 2014;Saif et al, 2016Saif et al, , 2018, India (Sharma et al, 2014) and Sumatra (Risdianto et al, 2016;Shepherd & Magnus, 2004). Similar data does not exist in Russia.…”

“…Environmental factors (e.g., differences in terrain and accessibility), as well as variations in subspecies characteristics (e.g., behavior and population abundance) influences poaching pressure and the methods employed by poachers vary between subspecies and range countries. For example, in Sumatra, previous work has demonstrated that the most common poaching method is wire snares (Linkie et al, 2015;Risdianto et al, 2016); in Bangladesh there is a range of methods including poison, trapping, clubbing and sometimes shooting (Saif et al, 2018); in Thailand poachers have been known to poison carcasses of wild prey to lure and subsequently kill tigers (Duangchantrasiri et al, 2016. ) These examples highlight the context-specificity of wildlife crime even within a single species.…”

“…However, range-wide, there is ample evidence that villagers will use self-defense or defense of livestock as an argument to poach tigers to sell into the illegal market (Karanth and Gopal 2005;Johnson et al, 2006;Goodrich et al, 2011;Saif 2018;Skidmore 2020b, among others). This behavior has been demonstrated in lion poaching as well (Everatt et al, 2019).…”