"Just another flavor of meat"

Author David Quammen talks about what the human race will lose if we don't allow the big alpha predators -- tigers, bears and crocodiles -- to survive. And OK, maybe they need to eat one of us once in a while.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Sep 24, 2003 | Last weekend, an American soldier killed a rare Bengal tiger in its cage in the Baghdad zoo.

The caged tiger's capital offense: biting a drunken G.I. when he baited the animal by sticking his arm in its cage in an attempt to feed it. The tiger reportedly tore off one of the G.I.'s fingers and mauled his arm, before another soldier shot it in the head three times.

Fatal encounters with carousing Americans troops aside, by the year 2150 zoos and test tubes will likely be the only places that Bengal tigers and all other man-eating predators will survive, according to natural history writer David Quammen in his new book, "Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind."

Quammen eschews "zoological melodrama" or "predator pornography," as he dubs the pulpy genre that encompasses most true-life tales of encounters between humans and the carnivores that occasionally eat them. His book is less monster bloodbath than an effort to understand how humans and their sometime predators still (barely) coexist today, and what exactly will be lost if the big cats, bears and crocodiles go extinct.

To take stock of the state of human-predator relations, Quammen traveled to lion territory in India's Gir forest, the saltwater crocodile lands of northern Australia, brown bear habitat in the Romanian mountains, and Siberian tiger country in the Russian Far East.

He went crocodile harpooning with aboriginal hunters in Australia and traveled across the snow with a Russian biologist who once spent 45 days on skis tracking a single Siberian tiger, feeding on leftovers from the tiger's kills when his own food supplies ran low.

In a phone interview with Salon, Quammen talked about how slaying all our monsters could soon put us on the top of the food chain, and why we need them around to remind us that we're "just another flavor of meat."

When you're in the Russian Far East, one native Udege man tells you that he's personally killed four Siberian tigers. There are only a few hundred of these tigers left in the world. You write that hearing this was like a splash of "cold water," but that since you've been traveling to investigate alpha-predator populations that share land with humans, you've learned that the "the world is full of cold water" and you've often found yourself "chilly and wet." What do you mean by that?

I started the book project partially because I was very interested in what big predators meant to the people who live closest to them, who live in the highest jeopardy.

I suppose I had a preconception, as maybe a lot of people would, that native people would have sort of a mystic resignation and spiritual acceptance of these big predators, that they'd say: "Oh, they're part of the land. They're part of the world. They represent gods to us. They're spiritual beings, and we have found ways to adapt."

And some of the native people told me things like that. One Romanian shepherd said: "A forest without bears is empty." That's a wonderful statement, but I also heard people say: "To hell with the bear. Kill them all."

Or, they'd say, "Oh, the tiger? I've killed four of them, and I'd kill more of them if I had the chance, because they compete with me for the red deer and the wild boar."

Which humans have the most to fear from these alpha predators?

The people who suffer the most inconvenience, the most danger, the most misery from big predators, the ones who pay the costs of big predators, are generally the poor and the dispossessed of land. They're native people who live very close to the landscape with a very small margin of safety.

The difficult question is: How do we as a world society rearrange things so that it's not the poor people who are paying the costs of big predators and the distant, affluent people in cities across oceans who enjoy the benefits of the continued existence of big predators? Namely, the aesthetic sense that these charismatic creatures are still out there, and the ecological benefits from the fact that they're still balancing these ecosystems.

Are there any good examples of that kind of rearrangement?

Only a very few pilot projects or beginning programs that need to be built. One of them is in the Northern Territory of Australia, where Aboriginal people are being allowed to begin harvesting crocodiles again.

Those people live out there in crocodile habitat, and if anybody is going to be killed by a saltwater crocodile, they're sort of the first in the crosshairs. But now they're also being allowed to harvest crocodile skin.

There's a community organization, a group of young guys known as the Djelk Rangers, who collect crocodile eggs for commercial sale of hatchlings and who occasionally harpoon crocodiles for sale of the skins. They're not using exactly traditional methods, but they're using half-traditional methods in that they're harpooning instead of using high-powered rifles.

Next Page: If you want to save an endangered species, do you have to put a commercial value on it?

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