"African tiger roar" is also a hot topic in recent years, many people on the Internet said that tigers have been successfully rewired in South Africa, causing a lot of damage to the local ecology, and killing many lions. Is this true or false?
The African Tiger Howl is the South African Tiger Valley Project, located in the Free State in central South Africa. The project was originally launched in 2000 by Quan Li, a Chinese woman and founder of the Save the Chinese Tiger Foundation, to train endangered captive South China tigers to be released into the wild in China.
Quan Li's South China tiger killed a white-faced fox
Jelly enlisted a collaboration with John Varty, a well-known Wildlife Producer in South Africa. However, the partnership was terminated in 2002 due to Wati's misappropriation of funds for the purchase of personal property. Quan Li and Watti each set up their own Tiger Valley project, Quan Li's is called Laohu Valley, and Wati's is called Tiger Canyon, one uses tiger's Chinese pinyin, and the other is tiger's English.
Vati's Tiger Valley was very different from Quan Li's original idea, and he introduced two pairs of Bengal tigers (some of which are of Siberian tiger ancestry) and declared that he wanted to establish a wild tiger population in Africa. The two pairs of tigers are Ron and Julie, who were introduced in 2000, and Xitao and Phantom, who were introduced in 2006. Vati paired Sito and Julie, Ron and Phantom, and they have now multiplied for several generations.
As a producer, Watty has made two documentaries about his training and breeding tigers, that is, "Walking with tigers" produced by the Discovery Channel in 2003 and "The Private Life of Tigers" produced by National Geographic in 2011.
Tiger Valley service
Tiger Valley in Wati and himself have websites and social accounts, and the most publicized is the travel, dining and hotel accommodation services in Tiger Valley. Therefore, Tiger Valley is a personal business project of Wati, with a strong profit attribute.
Vati named the tiger enclosure a private hunting reserve in Tiger Valley, and he claims on the website that the tigers here live a free life, no one disturbs them, and they are all wild tigers. At the end of Walking with the Tiger, Vati and his beast trainer David claim to have successfully rewild two young tigers, Ron and Julie, and say goodbye reluctantly. You don't actually have to say goodbye because they've been seeing it.
The most important thing about tiger rewilding is to let the tiger get rid of its dependence on people, and to make the tiger consciously stay away from humans, which is also the most failed place of the Tiger Valley project.
John Watty (right) and his tiger
It is clear from "Walking with the Tiger" that instead of trying to get the tigers out of them, Vati and others have been intensifying their interference with the tigers. The hunting of both tigers is done accompanied by humans, and after the tigers have completed the hunt, they have to forcibly snatch the prey to maintain "control" of the tiger.
If Vati really wants to release tigers into the wild to live freely, what is the point of controlling tigers? In fact, Wati does not want to let the tiger return to the mountain at all, but trains the tiger, just like the training of the hound, the difference is that people train the hounds to hunt, and the vati trains the tiger to make money for filming.
As seen in "The Private Life of a Tiger," Watti can get close to female tigers and cubs, shoot them up close, and even pet them, which is not possible for a true wild tiger.
Tigers in Tiger Valley lack basic fear of humans, and thanks to being surrounded by fences, they live in an enclosed space that would otherwise have been killed for threatening humans and animals. Two female tigers escaped from the fence and were soon shot dead by locals.
Tigers in Tiger Valley
In addition, it is doubtful whether the enclosed space of Tiger Valley is considered to be wild. The project was originally planned to cover an area of 370 square kilometers, which is, as Watty himself puts it, "six times the size of Manhattan Island." However, after Jelly and Watty separated, it is unknown how much land they each shared. In the film, Vati describes that his rewilding training was completed in a 30,000-square-meter fence, and then the tiger lived in a large fence of 600,000 square meters.
600,000 square meters is 0.6 square kilometers, and it is not enough to feed tigers. In Nepal's Chitwan National Park, the territory of a wild adult female tiger is 20 square kilometers, and the territory of an adult male tiger is about 150 square kilometers. Chitwan is also an area where tiger prey is abundant, and tiger territory is generally small. In Russia's Sikhote Arin Reserve, a female Siberian tiger has a territory of 500 square kilometers, and the male tiger has a larger territory.
Wild tiger territory is highly exclusive and does not allow other individuals of the same sex to enter. How many tigers are raised in The Tiger Valley in Vati? At most, there were 26 of them.
A 20-month-old tiger in Tiger Valley
How did Vaati feed so many tigers in such a small place? Moreover, according to the introduction of the website, there are cheetahs, serval cats, wild cats, foxes, coyotes, aardvarks, monitor lizards, porcupines, cobras and other animals in the valley, but there is a lack of ungulates, which is the staple food of tigers. The answer is also told to you in the film, that is, to buy ungulates and put them into the Tiger Valley for tigers to prey on, which is similar to some domestic wildlife parks to feed live chickens.
Vati claims that he has the only wild white tiger in the world in his valley, and there are indeed no wild white tigers in the world, but the problem is that his tigers are not wild either. Both Sitau and Julie carry the White Tiger gene, so they have a 25% chance of giving birth to a White Tiger. The white tigers in zoos have serious health problems due to inbreeding, not to mention the lack of hidden colors, and the white tigers are not suitable for survival in the wild.
Watty's breeding of white tigers that are not suitable for wild survival in order to gain eyeballs has to make people more suspicious of his motives.
Wati presents himself as a researcher in the film, but he is not a scholar at all and has never published a paper. His Tiger Valley Rewilding Project has also not been recognized by any academic papers or monographs.
Female white tiger and her two white tiger cubs
In summary, tiger valley is essentially a super large wildlife park, or tiger ranch, where the wild nature of tigers is indeed stronger than most zoos, but the essence is still captive tigers, compared to real wild tigers.
There is only one instance of tigers killing lions in Tiger Valley. The killer was the male tiger Sidau, and the victim was Savannah, a lioness, who was also born in the zoo and raised by Sidaw's wife, Julie. In January 2011, there was a major flood in the area, and in order to escape the flood, these tigers and lions huddled together and the scene was chaotic. Vati's gang decided to anesthetize the big cats and separate them. Tragedy struck at this time, and before Savannah could recover from the anesthetic, Sitau attacked it and bit it in the throat. Savannah died of massive bleeding and ineffective rescue.
Savannah, a lioness, helps her adoptive mother raise a litter of tigers
Savannah was quite large, said to be 160 kilograms, and Sidau never offended it during its normal time. The male tiger killed the female lion, or anesthetized and did not recover, I really don't know what to blow. Savannah and her adoptive mother Julie have a deep affection, often hunting together, and also helped Julie raise a baby tiger. Shortly after Savannah's murder, the lonely Julie was also killed by the Phantom, and the elderly Julie fought against the Phantom in her prime.
Some avid tiger lovers in China have fabricated multiple versions, what Ron killed two wandering male lions with one enemy and two, and the tiger beat a group of lions and killed the leader of the lion group, all of which do not exist, and no provenance can be found. Tigers in Tiger Valley have been living in a fenced area and have never seen wild lions.
According to incomplete statistics, 12 of the 16 adult tigers in the valley died at the hands of the same kind, which is almost the same as the Colosseum. Personally, I believe that this is directly related to the narrow area of Tiger Valley and the excessive density of tigers. Vati tried to shake the pot, saying that they were all wild tigers and that it was normal for them to fight. However, Tiger Valley is only a safari park, and poor management is the root cause. Since it's not that big, don't keep so many tigers.
Two tigers fighting within Tiger Valley
Conflicts between humans and big cats also occur frequently. In 2017, a 3-year-old child of an employee in Tiger Valley was killed by a cheetah, and cheetah injuries are rare under normal circumstances. Watty's response this time was more positive, he said that the cheetah will not be dealt with in any way, because the cheetah is not at fault, it is all the fault of the person, he is the boss, and he is fully responsible for this. At the same time, Vati himself was attacked by a tiger and bitten off two ribs, and he also shot a female tiger with a baby in the foot of a mistake.
At this point, the answer is clear, of course not, because the tigers here have never been successfully rewilded. Some people do question whether tigers will affect the local ecological balance, and the official response of Tiger Valley is:
The Tiger Valley project, built on the land of 17 abandoned sheep pastures and the destruction of local ecosystems due to overgrazing, has a positive impact on restoring local biodiversity. Moreover, Tiger Valley is completely fenced off, and tigers have no access to local wildlife. It seems that his tiger is not a wild tiger, Wati knows very well.
Cheetahs in Tiger Valley
Tiger roaring Africa destroys the ecology, mainly the concerns of domestic netizens. They have two concerns, one is that the tiger is running too fast, and the other is that the tiger eats too much. To be honest, both of these concerns are ridiculous.
It is emphasized many times in the film that tigers are hunters of ambushes in the jungle, need cover to get close to their prey, and speed has always been a weakness of tigers. Some people are amazed to see tigers hunting antelopes and ostriches, which is really a big fuss!
The antelopes hunted by tigers in "Walking with the Tiger" are mainly white-faced antelopes, which run very slowly and will not be faster than the tiger's natural staple food, the white spotted deer. In the film, the tiger also killed three springboks, and the springbok did run very fast, with a speed of 80-90 kilometers per hour, but the three springboks were captured in the rugged canyon area, and one of them was still slippery under the feet, and the speed advantage of the springbok in this environment could not be played.
In the Springbok-rich Kalahari Desert, Springbok accounts for 13% of the lion diet and 65% of springboks ate leopards. Lions and leopards can also hunt gazelles, and in the Serengeti steppe, Tang's gazelles account for 7.5% and 30 to 70% of the diet of lions and leopards, respectively. The habitats of both the Kalahari and Serengeti are endless, and the hunting difficulty of big cats is greater than that of Tiger Valley. The hunter really does not have to run faster than the prey, as long as the big cat is close to the ambush and plays the advantage of acceleration, it can also catch the prey.
Tiger cubs chase Springbok
In addition, the ostrich really did not blow so fast, according to the scholar Alexander, a 40 kg adult female ostrich speed of 61 km/ h, only slightly faster than the tiger. According to Dr. Schaller's calculations, a 230-kilogram male tiger has a speed of 56 kilometers per hour. Judging from some shots in the film, the tiger really can't run the ostrich on the open flat ground.
More than a decade ago, there was an argument among avid tiger fans that tigers were the only cats besides cheetahs that could catch ostriches, which is really ignorant, and lions, leopards and even cats have a record of killing ostriches. The speed of lions and tigers is similar, and Charler measured a female lion of 150 kg at a speed of 59 km/h.
At the end of "Walking with the Tiger", Ron and Julie hunt 7 antelopes a day, and some people worry that tigers entering Africa will eat all the ungulates. In fact, cats are ambush predators, do not need to do long chases, and the amount of food relative to canines is relatively small. Mr. Song Quist did a statistic in Chitwan Park that a single adult female tiger only needs to catch 45 prey a year.
Studies in both the Far East and South Asia have found that under normal circumstances, tigers have difficulty controlling the number of prey, and more often the number of prey in turn limits the tiger population. Because tigers prey on young or adult males, they are far inferior to wolves in controlling their prey. Only when the prey population is at a low ebb due to disease or other reasons, tiger predation may temporarily delay the recovery of the prey population.
Flying ostriches
Two tigers hunt 7 antelopes a day, which is called killing behavior, and mostly occurs when the movement of prey is restricted. Sheep cluttering in sheep pens are most likely to stimulate the killing instincts of cats, and in extreme cases a single lynx or mountain lion can kill hundreds of sheep overnight. The antelopes in Tiger Valley are artificially dropped in, and a large herd is crowded in the valley, unfamiliar with the environment, which is an easy target for the home tigers. In healthy natural ecosystems, no killing usually occurs.
Opponents have also said that tigers cannot gain a foothold in Africa, which is also biased. Africa lacks tigers because they are blocked by large swaths of grasslands and deserts in Western Asia. Located along the Orange River, Tiger Valley is rich in vegetation and rugged terrain, providing cover for tiger hunting. In addition, there are no large beasts such as lions and spotted hyenas in the surrounding area, and the area is still more suitable for tigers.
The environment of Tiger Valley
However, the introduction of tigers outside the origin of tigers is still a mixed-race tiger, which is very amateurish and has no ecological protection value, only economic value. As a result, some conservationists criticize that Vaati is just manipulating tigers to make movies to make money.
This article is mainly critical of Watty because his name is a wild tiger, which is actually for profit. But objectively speaking, Vati does provide a high quality of life for his tigers, far better than being locked up in a zoo, and I admire him for that. It is human nature to pursue profits, so don't flaunt them so high.