Securing the Future for Nepal's Tigers: Lessons from the Past and Present

The story of tiger conservation in Nepal is a narrative with many twists and turns. Insights from this account are more important to understanding the persistence of tigers than the details of rigorous scientific analysis of a single aspect of tiger population dynamics or ecology. Key components of tiger conservation clearly include knowledge of their ecology and behavior and rigorous, scientific techniques for monitoring changes in the vital rates of tigers. However, the primary agents of change in numbers of tigers and tiger habitat quality are humans, so it is equally important to focus our conservation efforts to understand human behaviors that impact tigers and their habitat. For tiger habitats, Nepal's rapidly developing co-management provide insights that may be helpful in stemming the range-wide decline in tiger numbers and increasing pace of local population extinctions. There is an emerging, alternative view that suggests that when conservation focuses at landscape and ecosystem levels the result is a healthier, intact ecosystem, which in turn better sustains tigers, biodiversity, and human economies at various levels. This chapter reviews the history of tigers in Nepal beginning with the early years of tiger hunting by Nepal's rulers through the malaria eradication program that permanently altered the tiger's habitat.