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  The Star 5 Oct 06
Getting wild tigers to leave farm animals alone
Story and photo by Lee Yuk Peng

MALACCA: An adult tiger usually takes only five minutes to finish off 3kg of mutton. However, Awang Senyum Umbai, a wild male tiger caught in Pekan, Pahang, does not even touch the mutton served to him. Neither do his two “cell mates” – a male and a female, also wild tigers – at the Malacca Zoo.

These tigers are involved in an experiment being carried out by independent researcher S. Jothiratnam.

Last Friday, Jothiratnam gave the tigers mutton injected with lithium chloride (salt). They threw up a few hours later. Yesterday, when they were served fresh mutton without the lithium chloride, the meat was left untouched by all three.

“This is a conditioned flavour aversion to get tigers to refrain from mutton. If this is successful, then I can proceed to do the same with tigers in the wild with beef,” Jothiratnam said.

Going by this theory, wild tigers should not kill cows for its meat anymore, Jothiratnam said, adding that this would go a long way to enabling tigers to continue living in the wild and not attack farm animals and cause humans to go after them.

“Trapping wild tigers and keeping them in cages is like sentencing them to life imprisonment, and it is costly to maintain a tiger this way. How many tigers can you keep in the zoo?” asked Jothiratnam.

He said tigers kept in cages could not mate and even if they were allowed to, the babies would not be able to survive in the wild, as they would not have their mothers to teach them to hunt.

His method would condition wild tigers to avoid beef and to stop killing cows. As a result, villagers living on the fringes of forests and tigers could co-exist without harming each other.

There were about 600 to 700 tigers in the forests of Kelantan, Pahang, Perak and Terengganu, he said.

Jothiratnam, who used to be a professor in physics and philosophy in a University in Ohio, United States, now prefers to work with wildlife. He received a RM12,000 grant from Astro for the first phase of the experiment. He would need RM180,000 more for the second phase to buy a pickup truck to travel into the jungle, and cows and buffaloes as meat for the wild tigers, and set up hidden cameras in the forest to monitor the animals.

Malacca Zoo director Mohd Nawayai Yasak, when asked to comment on the experiment, said he fully supported it, saying that it had lots of potential and hoped it would be a success.

“This would mean that I would have fewer wild tigers to keep in the zoo,” he said, adding that tigers should live in the wild.

However, Mohd Nawayai said the zoo was a controlled environment and that there might be some other factors to consider when carrying out the experiment in the jungle.
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