Boris Johnson

The tiger and me

<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;">There's a moral duty to save the king of the beasts</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;"> </span>

I am here in India looking for tigers, and am struck by the way my fellow human beings respond to their encounters —what they want from the whole tiger experience. It is a privilege to see these animals in the wild, and believe me, you can easily fail.

Years ago I spent days tracking them at another park, and though the gamekeepers kept up a plucky commentary — pointing to scratches on trees and snapped grass stems that proved ‘tiger was here’ — we saw neither hide nor hair.

Here at Ranthambore in Rajasthan, however, it is another story. The leaves have yet to return to the axle wood trees; the guides are expert, cocking their ears for the distress call of the chital deer, and people are spotting so many tigers that they are getting quite competitive, in a way that is revealing of our frail human psychology.

It’s all about the ratio of people to beast, and what the punters want is the maximum tiger score to themselves. When one jeep spots a tiger, the word spreads and soon the animal is at the centre of a Hyde Park Corner of 4x4s and charabancs, with cameras sputtering like childish machine-gun fire.

So people always hope for something more exclusive. They want to be alone with the animal, to commune privately, with their eyes locked uniquely on those tiger eyes like giant yellow marbles of liquid fire. They want to boast how they, and they alone, saw the tiger do something special: yawn, scratch, blink, stand up — perhaps even charge — as though its routines were entirely for them.

The result is that even here in Ranthambore, the finest tiger reserve on Earth, the human lust to be exposed to a tiger wildly exceeds the supply; and so I have a question.

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