The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has refuted a report claiming that India has become the capital of tiger poaching. Referring to a report “Bharat baghon ki taskari ka gadh’’ published in Rajasthan Patrika on 9th November 2022, the ministry said that the report is based on incorrect facts and figures, and that misleading information has been published by the Hindi newspaper with the sole intention of creating sensational news.
The ministry in a statement issued today said that the report relies on certain reports which make unrealistic assumptions about the seizure of tiger parts. The ministry said that the report is incorrect because the seized ‘tiger organs’ actually includes a large number of fakes.
The Rajasthan Patrika report claimed that during the 22-year period from 2000 to 2022, as many as 759 tiger parts were seized from smugglers. Citing a report titled Skin and Bones by Traffic, the news report claimed that this was 34% of all seizures in the world for that period, as the corresponding figure for the entire world was 2205. The same report stated that the second highest seizures were from China, at 212, which was followed by Indonesia with 207 seizures.
स्किन एंड बोन्स रिपोर्ट: देश में जनवरी 2018 से जून 2022 के बीच 165 घटनाएं
— Patrika Hindi News (@PatrikaNews) November 9, 2022
भारत बाघों की तस्करी का गढ़#patrika #rajasthanpatrika pic.twitter.com/NjtvdOnCdQ
However, the Skin and Bones report mentions that these numbers include both whole tigers and their parts. This means if multiple parts of the same tiger are confiscated from smugglers, each of them will count as separate seizure. The report by Traffic also ‘estimated’ the number of confiscated tigers from the number of seizure incidents, and they claimed that based on the 2205 seizures, 3377 tigers were confiscated. Accordingly, they claimed that there were 893 confiscations of tigers in India.
The Rajasthan Patrika report did mention that these numbers are not reliable, as the seizure of fake tiger parts is common in India. They mentioned that the skins of other animals are painted to sell them as tiger skins. Similarly, fake tiger teeth, claws etc are also sold in the illegal animal parts market.
The ministry also has said that the assumptions made in the Skin and Bones report are wrong because there are certain communities in India that specialize in making fake tiger claws using the bones of livestock. Counting seized materials like claws as that of a tiger without verifying the genuineness using DNA-based techniques will often lead to an inflated number of tiger deaths. “Such reports are published with half-baked information by the vested interests to malign the efforts of the Government of India for tiger conservation,” the statement added.
The ministry said that the systematic data of tiger mortality is being maintained by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) from the year 2012 onwards only, and therefore any report quoting tiger mortality details prior to 2012 has to invariably depend upon on unverifiable facts/ assumptions and anecdotal evidence.
The statement stated that for the period 2017-2021, NTCA has recorded 547 tiger mortality instances out of which 393 tigers were due to natural causes. Out of the rest 154, 25 were poisoning, 9 snaring, 7 shooting or elimination, 55 seizures, 22 electrocution and 33 poaching. Therefore, only 88 could be attributed to poaching for illegal body parts and wildlife trade in the strictest sense, which is 16% of tiger deaths in the last 5 years.
The ministry added that the NTCA has established stringent standards for recording tiger deaths.
