Neil Carter
Doctoral student
Lansing, Michigan

A little bananas, a little bit of the bananas.

I study the interactions between humans and tigers in Chitwan, Nepal.

Success to me is identifying the conditions where I think would allow people and tigers to coexist into the long-term future. Not only do they live side by side, but they actually—people will walk into the forests to collect various things for their households and actually will walk in the same places that tigers frequently walk.

People there really depend on the local forest. They are a subsistence culture, and so it is important that the forests stay healthy. We want to try to let people understand that having tigers there is important to keep the forests healthy. It keeps the number of deer and boar down a little bit because deer and boar often will eat people’s crops, which is probably even more detrimental to their livelihoods than tigers are. They do sometimes—rarely—eat people. And they do also sometimes eat people’s livestock. So that is a concern and tiger conservation is mitigating those type of risks on people from tigers.

It is very rare to see a tiger and that is part of what they are—part of why they are so part of people’s culture, is this sort of mysticism. You know they’re there. They are a big animal and you will see all kinds of signs. You’ll see their paw prints. You’ll see their scat. You’ll see you’ll see all kinds of things—scratch marks on trees—but you won’t see a tiger. And even all the months that I have been in Nepal, I have seen a tiger twice.

When people usually think of Nepal, they think of Mt. Everest, they think of the Himalayas. Actually, Chitwan is in the flat area of Nepal. It’s right at the very base of the Himalayas, so it is a really rich, fertile area. So there is a huge agricultural activity there. So it’s basically a collection of villages. There are some kind of medium-size cities in Chitwan, but basically it’s an agricultural rural area.

It is interesting to me that you can have an animal that is so charismatic that people respond to viscerally yet that are still endangered and are still declining. There seems to be this disparity in the way we value this animal—our kind of inability to protect them. So that to me presented a challenge. There was a charisma, but now it sort of becomes the challenge of let’s take this animal that everybody values and respects and really try to buckle down and improve conservation for tigers. They are very symbolic, and people have, like I said, have lived next to tigers for as far back as they can remember—so kind of letting people understand that protecting them is protecting their heritage.

Even here in the U.S. there is a lot of talk about how do we coexist with things like wolves? How do we coexist with animals like grizzlies that do present a risk to people but also are valued a great deal by people?

When people talk about conserving tigers, they don’t conserve one. They conserve a population of them and they want to conserve the species. And that really means protecting whole ecosystems, whole large tracts of land that protect not just the tigers but elephants and rhinos and deer and boar and reptiles and alligators and insects and all of the plants and everything that lives in that ecosystem.

So it is kind of a really big task because you are not just protecting tigers. That is just sort of the animal that we use to focus the energy and money, but it’s about protecting our environment and our ecosystems that tigers live in. So that’s kind of the way I think of it. It is really a challenge, but the reward can be potentially huge if you can be successful.