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K. Ullas Karanth is director of the India programme of the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Mysore, but did a complete flip during an exchange trip to the US. High grades for a short course at the Smithsonian Institution helped him qualify for a master’s degree in wildlife biology at the University of Florida, followed by a doctorate in applied zoology from Mangalore University. He is a fellow of the Zoological Society of London with more than 50 scientific papers published, including the paper that caused the row (Animal Conservation vol 6, p 141).

What got you interested in tigers?

My father did not believe in formal education in the early years, so my three siblings and I were educated informally at home in our village of Puttur on the coast of Karnataka until the age of 10. Our teacher taught us mathematics and the regional language, Kannada, and then we were let loose for the day. Since we lived close to nature, I had time to go into the woods and watch animals. The fascination with tigers started then.

So what is their appeal?

If you had to design an animal that lives by eating meat and killing animals, sometimes three to four times larger than itself, you’d require impossibly good engineering skills. Though the essence of the body plan of tiger is the teeth, which are used for quickly rupturing blood vessels, its camouflage, eyesight, and long whiskers help it feel its way through the jungle and the darkness. If you asked an engineer, in all likelihood he would create a clumsy sci-fi movie monster. In design terms, nature has so much to offer that we are thoughtlessly wiping out.

But didn’t you start out as an engineer?

Though I was an amateur naturalist at heart, I studied engineering to earn a livelihood, for in those days there were not many career options. But I was never happy and felt trapped. I quit, took to farming and grew crops that gave me a few free months a year for animal watching. Then, through an exchange programme, I went to the US. And when I visited the wildlife biology department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I was inspired to get professionally trained. I had read George Schaller’s book The Deer and the Tiger and I felt like a man with poor eyesight being given a pair of glasses when I realised I could turn nature watching into a career.

What is your attitude to tigers? Are you conserving them or researching them?

I started my life as a conservation activist and then trained myself as a scientist. I used to campaign for wildlife conservation, write articles in newspapers and letters to the editors. During the early 1980s, we vigorously campaigned against a jungle resort that was proposed in a wildlife corridor between Bandipur national park and Nagarhole tiger reserve. After two years, we won. My basic motive has always been to act. But it was not pure altruism like being fuelled by seeing people dying on the street. I wanted to save forests and animals because I found them absolutely fascinating. It seems to me that scientists ask fundamental questions, which may not always have any immediate use, whereas the kind of questions I ask mostly do. So I don’t ask why tigers have stripes instead of blotches – that would be a question of pure evolutionary value, but not of much use. The damn tiger has stripes and we have to save it the way it is. I am more interested in knowing how they eat, how far they go, what happens when humans impact on their habitat.

So your useful thing is counting them?

There has been global concern and a lot of passion but no rigorous evaluation of what is happening to this animal. It’s not easy to do so either, because tigers are very secretive: they avoid humans and live at very low population density. Even in the best-protected reserves, few tigers live in a given area. A tiger habitat as big as London or Bangalore will not have more than six to eight tigers.

Doesn’t that make counting difficult?

Absolutely, and that’s why I thought of a novel addition to the photo-capture method. I knew from my frequent visits to the jungle and zoos that tigers can be recognised by their stripes. In fact, most animals with complex markings, like zebras, cheetahs, and leopards, can be recognised from their marks. But “photographically capturing” tigers is not easy. Gradually technology evolved and people started using automatic cameras in large numbers. I applied the “capture-recapture” sampling approach, which was used to estimate numbers of rodents, insects or birds based on individual identification from tags, to tigers, which have natural markings.

How does it work?

The theory is simple. Initially you don’t know the total tiger population size. So you go out, photo-capture some tigers and identify them. Next, you photo-capture a second sample. The proportion of previously identified animals in the second sample provides an estimate of the proportion of all tigers you did manage to catch. Knowing how many tigers you have caught and what proportion of the unknown total they constitute, you can estimate the tiger population despite not capturing all animals. In the real world, it’s a bit more complex, of course!

The former director of Project Tiger says there are about 3600 tigers. Is he right?

It’s not scientifically possible to arrive at accurate figures. India has a huge spatial scale of 300,000 square kilometres of tiger habitat, and it’s not possible to arrive at this kind of figure unless a large number of point estimates of densities are established.

What was so wrong with the conventional method that you felt you had to attack it?

Indian officials have used a single approach called the “pugmark census method” to monitor tiger populations for the past 30 years. Tiger tracks are located and plaster casts, or tracings, of the imprints of the left hind paws of “nearly all the tigers” are claimed to be taken. These “pugmarks” are used to identify tigers by comparing differences in shape and other measurements, and by taking into account local knowledge. But lifting footprints has some preconditions – the substrate has to be overlaid with dust or sand because loose or muddy soil invalidates identification, by distorting track shapes. Since such ideal soil conditions do not occur in most areas, the census officials lift footprints from inappropriate substrates. Often animals are misidentified and counted multiple times.

That doesn’t sound scientific…

No, the method is not scientifically defensible. And it gets worse. Although an elaborate record-keeping protocol has been prescribed for the pugmark censuses, this protocol essentially ignores the fundamental need for mapping and geo-referencing the tiger signs that are detected by field workers. As a result, even after 30 years of pugmark censuses, large-scale, country-wide maps of tiger distribution are not yet available. Since the search routes, distances covered and time spent in looking for tiger tracks have not been recorded and replicated over successive censuses, the raw counts of tracks cannot be used to produce indices that can detect changes in tiger numbers or habitat occupancy over time. So three decades of tiger monitoring have basically failed in India, despite being backed by massive investments.

Have the donors complained?

Most of the funds in tiger conservation are from the government of India – it’s the taxpayers’ money but they don’t ask any questions. We never hear any debate in Parliament or the state assembly. People’s representatives ask some silly questions sometimes, such as how many tigers or leopards are there in India. The government reels out some figures and the matter ends.

Foreign donors have their own failings. The small non-governmental organisations are not critical in their thinking. They are mostly do-gooders, while the second category of large multilateral donors like the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) are completely mindless. They just want large chunks of money to go out of their coffers: they measure success by the amount of money they have spent. They don’t use science as their yardstick although they have scientists on their staff. In fact, GEF’s tiger funding in India is a classic example of the “throwing money at a problem” approach to conservation.

Where does the money go?

On corrupting the whole system. Small wonder that lack of science in management and lack of scientific accountability thrive in this environment!

Did your paper have much impact?

Even though it has been reported widely in the international media and reputed journals, I don’t think it is a big deal in India. The Ministries of Forest and Environment and Science and Technology have shown no interest. The former announced that they will pump in more money, and the director of Project Tiger says everything is fine with their census programme. This is precisely the point of my paper, and it has been proved by the government’s response – which is to do nothing.

How accurately are other animals counted?

No matter who is counting the animals, as long as the method is right, the results would be fairly accurate. The capture-recapture method works for animals like tigers that are secretive, live in low densities and which you can’t see with ease. So you either set the trap and catch it physically or set the camera and photograph it. A new addition to this is to use a DNA-based identification of the animal from a sample taken from its droppings or hair. All this can be analysed in the capture-recapture method.

The second method most often used by scientists is distance sampling. This method is used to count animals that cannot be caught, marked and released but which can be seen easily – like whales, elephants or tiger prey such as deer, pigs and wild cattle. For instance, you walk along a trail through the forest, see the prey animal and count their numbers. As the distance from the trail increases, the proportion of animals you miss out of all animals present increases.

In distance sampling, you also try to estimate what proportion of all animals you actually managed to detect and count. You do this by using a rangefinder to measure how far each animal you saw was from your travel path. The assumption here is that you are not seeing all the animals, and the proportion of animals detected is estimated using the distance data. Instead of using such validated methods, even for counting other animals, the Indian government uses invalid “census” approaches.

Should there be a tiger-counting summit?

Having a scientific summit is a good idea. The last international conference on tiger conservation was convened more than five years ago in London. A small and focused meeting of serious groups might help bring out the problems in conserving the big cat.

Aside from your controversial counting work, years of field work must have yielded interesting insights?

Yes, in macroecology – which tries to establish patterns in nature over large regions and across long timescales. Most of the good macroecological work is based on data from disparate studies, possibly spanning 30 to 40 countries on different continents with different species, which tries to infer some pattern from that data. We, however, are using our own field data collected over eight years across 10 different tiger habitats in India to test out the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the abundance of tigers and the abundance of their prey.

So what is that relationship?

We knew that tigers need a certain number of prey in a year to survive. We built a model and tested the hypothesis that tigers annually take about 10 per cent of the prey population. They do.

Have you ever been pursued by tigers?

Not quite. It’s a wrong perception that all tigers chase and kill people. They are very secretive and avoid humans. Once I had a TV crew with me and we spotted a tigress with her two cubs early in the morning. Sensing some danger to her cubs, the tigress charged our jeep. My friends were terrified but experience told me she wouldn’t harm us, and indeed she did not.

I can see a cat – do you have other pets in your house?

When I was young I had lots of animals, including deer, peacocks – and chickens when I was a farmer. But it’s criminal to keep pets in cities. Have you noticed the amount of damage pet cats cause to birds? I’m keeping this cat as he is my daughter’s pet and is utterly useless at catching anything.