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Editorial: Tiger's law enforcement
A number of Sumatran tigers and elephants have separately attacked human beings within the protected forests and residential areas in Sumatra's Riau, Jambi and Lampung provinces, killing 10 people and wounding dozens others, in the past five weeks
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A number of Sumatran tigers and elephants have separately attacked human beings within the protected forests and residential areas in Sumatra's Riau, Jambi and Lampung provinces, killing 10 people and wounding dozens others, in the past five weeks.
In revenge, residents have hunted and killed four tigers, but only managed to draw the elephants away from their neighborhoods.
Is killing the Sumatran tigers, which are facing extinction, either in defense or in revenge of the tigers' attacks proper? Are only the tigers to blame? Don't human beings have the biggest share of blame for the animals' attacks?
The attacks by the tigers and the elephants, as experts have said, are an indicator and a result of the fast-diminishing habitat of the animals caused by the clearing of forests - either protected or non-protected ones - for development purposes and conversion into industrial plantations.
The animals apparently came out of their already limited habitat for food as they could no longer find it within the continuously decreasing forest area. In hunger, they entered the residential areas at the forest borders, encountered people, attacked and killed them, although human beings are traditionally not part of the tigers' food chain.
Surprisingly in some cases, like the recent tiger attacks in Jambi's protected forest, the human victims were illegal loggers - meaning that the animals attacked people who were destroying their habitat on the spot. It seems that the tigers took over the job of the forest rangers in keeping the Indonesian forests - widely dubbed as the lungs of the world - intact.
Killing the Sumatran tigers is also unlawful as they are now the world's most critically endangered tiger subspecies, which means that they are also categorized as protected animals.
What is obvious from the critically unfriendly animal-human relationship is that human beings, for the sake of development programs, will always be the eventual winners in their battle against the animals. But maintaining the forests and the existence of animals, including endangered ones like the Sumatran tigers, is necessary to maintain the equilibrium and sustainability of the environment, of which human beings are also a part.
