Sniffer dogs chase tigers in Cambodia's jungles

Feb 17, 2010
By Christiane Oelrich
DPA

Sen Monorom, Cambodia - Labrador mongrels Sadie and Scooby leap through the thick undergrowth of Cambodia's jungle, chasing their prey.

Finally, success. Scooby barks excitedly and marks his target. An exceptionally big and smelly pile of tiger droppings.

The two dogs have been trained in the US to hunt down the big cats' traces in Cambodia's huge tropical forest. They were hired, together with their handlers, by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

The droppings are to help biologists determine how many tigers and leopards are still left in this wilderness region.

Environmentalists from across the globe have started a campaign to save the great cats from extinction, timed to coincide with the start of the Chinese Year of the Tiger.

Only about 3,200 tigers are believed to roam the jungles worldwide - down from more than 100,000 a century ago - a trend the activists hope to start reversing in Cambodia's forest nature reserves.

'This region has huge potential,' says Nick Cox, head of WWF's tiger programme in South-East Asia. 'The tropical forests are still intact, and if they are properly protected and there are enough prey animals, they are perfect tiger territory.'

'We want to bring tiger numbers back to the level from 50 years ago,' he says.

The 540,000-square-kilometre forest area - which is almost the size of France - ranges from Laos to north-eastern Cambodia and neighbouring Vietnam.

In the thick undergrowth, tigers can stalk their prey without being seen, creating perfect conditions for the big cats.

Indochina's colonial masters, the French, drastically reduced the wildlife in the region, as did the subsequent civil wars and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime.

But what almost killed off the tigers was the insatiable demand from the market for traditional Chinese medicine, boosted by the long-disproved belief that tiger parts increase a man's sexual potency.

A dead tiger can earn a poacher up to 14,000 dollars.

Lean Kha says he killed 14 tigers in his poaching career. Now, he is a gamekeeper and hunts poachers.

'I know that it was a mistake,' he says. 'I have done much damage, and Buddhism demands that I make amends.'

For the past five years, patrols in the nature reserve have been stepped up. 'We have reduced the number of poachers and illegal loggers, by 95 per cent,' says nature reserve chief Sopheak Keo.

'Our gamekeepers only rarely find sawdust or animal innards, which hint at illegal goings-on.' Twenty poachers and loggers are imprisoned right now, he says.

Tigers living in their natural habitats are the best guarantee for an intact ecosystem, environmentalists argue. They want to convince governments that tigers are more valuable alive then dead.

A good tiger population in the wild can bring in a steady stream of safari tourists, they say, leading to governments preserving their forests and stopping them being turned into plantations.

'Forests conserve water resources, and tigers live near waterholes,' says US biologist Eric Dinerman. 'If governments protect their forests as tiger habitats, they also protect the water resources for millions of people.'

However, raising tiger numbers is not easy.

Releasing tigers bred in captivity is risky as they might introduce diseases. Also, for a forest to support a tiger population, there has to be enough prey. A grown tiger needs about 50 prey animals per year, says Omaliss Keo, an ecologist with Cambodia's forest authority.

'We need enough prey animals, then the forest could sustain two to three tigers per 100 square kilometres,' he says.

Some 350 tigers are believed to live in the forest area covering parts of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, says Omaliss Keo. There are probably 30 of them in Cambodia.

Former poacher Lean Kha thinks there may be more. Two months ago, he again found scratch marks on the forest floor.

This is where Scooby and Sadie come in. The poo sniffers and their handlers have set up camp at the Mereuch Ranger station.

Every find is awarded with games, while helpers measure the excrement heap and take samples. 'Every day we find 10 to 15,' dog handler Elizabeth Seely says. But only the lab can finally determine if the sample is from a tiger or leopard.

'We think that we found four tiger-heaps in the past eight weeks,' she says.

Private equity gambling in Cambodia?

Private equity lines up for a slice of Cambodia

09 Apr 2008
Anne Hyland
The Australian Financial Review

The bright hopes of private equity may have faded with the credit crisis, but not in Cambodia.

At least $US200 million ($216 million) is being raised for deals there and it has drawn in some of the region's most influential investment advisers.

A group of former CLSA investment bankers has established Leopard Asia and has been marketing its $US100 million fund. Leopard's board of directors includes Ken Courtis, the former managing director of Goldman Sachs Asia, Marc Faber, the respected contrarian fund manager and Jim Walker, who is considered one of Asia's best economists.

Another $US100 million fund, Cambodia Emerald, is also raising funds and is headed by two American entrepreneurs who last November broke away from Leopard.

SAS Global, a Perth-based advisory firm, has also been working away quietly in Cambodia. It has a significant property investment on the coastline and may consider developing a hedge fund that would seek exposure to Cambodia's nascent mining industry.

Another fund, JSM Indochina, raised $US220 million on London's AIM market last year to build shopping centres and flats in Vietnam and Cambodia. The decision to tap investors for capital to invest in Cambodian companies and infrastructure is a high risk bet at the best of times. JSM Indochina was forced to scale back the size of its fund, which it originally had claimed would be $US600 million.

Now, in a global financial crisis, the move to establish private equity firms in Cambodia may be perceived as brave, if not foolish.

Leopard's managing director, Doug Clayton, argues it is possible for the buyout boom to continue. "We're looking for a relatively small amount in the global investment pool," he says. "The Cambodian economy is so uncorrelated with the rest of the world that it's likely to grow even if the US has a major recession."

Leopard, like Cambodia Emerald, sees a pipeline of deals in just about every sector: financial services (Cambodia's stockmarket starts next year), agribusiness, mining and oil services, tourism, infrastructure, power and telecoms.

"There's an opportunity to do something simple like build a road say from one city to another and charge a toll," explains Clayton. "That's just a basic economic need for a country and that need continues regardless of what happens to Wall Street. It's really a grass roots opportunity to fill basic needs that would have been filled had Cambodia not had such a bad history for the past 40 years."

Brad Gordon, managing director of Cambodia Emerald, says his fund has seed investors such as New York-based LR Global Partners and does not expect too many hurdles in raising capital. "Of course, it's much better to be fund-raising in a positive economic climate," he says. "Cambodia is not exactly correlated with what's happening in other parts of the world and for very sophisticated investors, investment in a fund in Cambodia might make sense for a portfolio diversification."

He says Cambodia Emerald will target start-up companies rather than established firms and will be looking at deals of between $US5 million and $US10 million. "We don't see any difficulty in finding deal flow," Gordon says. "The difficulty will be more on the execution side and making decisions about which investments to follow through on."

It is to be expected that private equity firms are going to put the best possible spin on Cambodia and the country does have its positives. It has a better record on political stability than Thailand in recent years. It also has economic growth of almost 10 per cent, which is double that of its neighbour. Cambodia's foreign investment laws are also far more liberal than Thailand and Vietnam.

Nonetheless, these positives are counterbalanced, maybe even outweighed, by Cambodia's endemic corruption, weak rule of law and the fact it is a minnow. Its population is only 14 million. The aggressive push by private equity funds is typical of the industry's tendency to take enormous risks and scale new heights. Whether the timing or the unlikely destination is right will be determined by the returns the funds are promising - and lately they have been dwindling for the industry globally.

Spotted and snapped: first photos of leopard with young in Cambodia

03 May 2007
World Wildlife Foundation (WWF)

Srepok, Cambodia – The first ever photographs of a wild leopard with young in Cambodia show that a pioneering project is helping to conserve wildlife and support local livelihoods there.

The photographs were taken by the animals themselves when they triggered camera traps that had been set up by wildlife biologists working with local community rangers.

“They are very secretive creatures and incredibly difficult to see, even with the best guides,” says Nick Cox of WWF's Greater Mekong office.

“But in the Srepok Wilderness Area of the Mondulkiri protected forest in north-eastern Cambodia, our rangers have had recent encounters with leopards that would make big cat biologists green with envy.”

The Srepok Wilderness Area Project (SWAP) aims to ensure that local people benefit from conservation in a part of Cambodia where forests are relatively intact, but threatened by illegal logging, conversion for agriculture and the unsustainable trade in wildlife products.

WWF is working with the Cambodian government and the International Institute for Environment and Development on the project, which is part funded by the Darwin Initiative.

The project partners are aware that conservation in a country as poor as Cambodia will only succeed if local people continue to benefit economically from the Mekong River and its surrounding forests. The area’s wildlife has been struggling as a consequence of decades of war, colonial mismanagement of wildlife and civil strife.

The Srepok wilderness area was largely unprotected until WWF began working there in 2002. The rangers working in the forest have provided anecdotal evidence of their belief that the forest ecosystem is recovering, but nothing firm until now.

Leopards will only reproduce if the conditions are right and these photographs are an initial positive indicator of a healty ecosystem.

Under the Darwin Initiative funded project, Julia Chase-Grey is studying how local hunting and farming practices affect populations of the leopard and its prey species, such as the dog-like dhole.

“Very little information exists on the ecology or conservation of the leopard in Cambodia,” says Chase-Grey, a PhD student at Durham University, United Kingdom.

Chase-Grey spent two months working with rangers from local communities, whose knowledge of the area and its wildlife meant they could advise her where to set up the camera traps.

The SWAP has trained the rangers in an effort to provide sustainable alternatives to hunting.

James MacGregor of the International Institute for Environment and Development says that the SWAP’s innovative approach provides a practical lesson in best practice conservation management in genuine collaboration with local people.

“This project highlights the importance of involving local people in conservation and ensuring that they have a stake in protecting wildlife,” says MacGregor.

“The Srepok Wilderness Area Project is helping to restore the natural wildlife populations and provide local people with pathways out of poverty.”