Nine Out of Ten Tigers Agree; More Civil Wars, Fewer Tsunamis

There's a guy in Aceh who claims he can speak to tigers. He is actually on the payroll of Aceh's Natural Resources Conservation Agency and his job is to go to areas that have had tiger incursions and persuade them to return to the forest. Apparently he has quite a success rate. Despite the desperate rarity of the Sumatran tiger contacts between them and humans have been growing, largely because the forests they live in are getting rarer even faster than the tigers. Tigers have been prowling through villages causing angst to the locals and the locals have responded by calling in this guy. Oh, and poaching.

Wouldn't it be cool to have something like "Tiger Liaison Officer" on your resume? "Oh yes," you could say at dinner parties, "I was based in Aceh for a few years but then head office called me and asked me to take over the Rajastan bureau but the schools there weren't great so I quit." Apparently things have been made worse in Aceh tigerwise by the unexpected outbreak of peace. There has been a civil war going there for ages and as usual people had fled outlying farms and villages for the more communal dangers of the city. However the war ended a few years ago and people are moving back to the countryside. Unfortunately so are the tigers.

Sadly the tigers are just one more victim of the massive tsunami which swept largely poor regions with lots of coastline back in 2004. The Indonesian army and the Acehnese guerrillas looked at the devastation and realised that what they had been doing was simply mickey mouse by comparison. The army moved out, the guerrillas disbanded, elections were held, guerrilla supported parties won but affirmed loyalty to Jakarta. A happy ending for everyone except the long suffering Sumatran tiger who must have been hoping the war would go on forever. It just goes to show that there is a loser at every peace conference. Rumours that hot heads demanding continued fighting were tigers in disguise have so far not been proved.

The more I look at the world the more I realise that the cause of most of what happens can be put down to irony. The tigers benefited from a man made disaster and their existence is now threatened due to a natural one. Tell that to the next environmentalist who demands that military budgets be cut back in order to fund saving the planet.