Shooting Tigers

This segment was originally broadcast on Nov. 19, 2006. It was updated on July 8, 2007.

There were tigers, once, that ranged wild from Siberia to India, up to 100,000 of them. But not now: the world has gone from 100,000 to 5,000. And a recent, surprising discovery suggests that time is running out for the tigers that survive.

No one understands the decline of the tiger better than Belinda Wright, an Indian woman of English descent, who's famous for shooting tigers – photographing them. Her daring encounters made her one of the great shooters, in fact, the first woman photographer at National Geographic. Correspondent Scott Pelley wanted to find out what's driving wild tigers to extinction so 60 Minutes asked Wright to take our team into the jungle.

The word "tiger" comes from Greek, meaning "arrow." Here's why: tigers hit 35 miles an hour. They're among the most powerful hunters on land or in water. Wright photographed one taking a 250 lb. deer, defying hungry crocodiles, and swimming the beast back to shore.

"I think the most extraordinary thing about tigers is they're solitary. So a sick tiger, a weak tiger, a physically disabled tiger, is a dead tiger. So every tiger you see has to be absolute perfection," Wright explains.

Belinda Wright grew up in India, in "tigerland," so for her our trip was a homecoming. The 60 Minutes crew started out in the capital, New Delhi.

Asked to describe where the crew would be heading, Wright explains, "If you put a pin into the middle of India, that's where we're going. It's right in the heart, in the center of India and in many ways it's the most magical part of India, too."

The team rolled to a tiger reserve called Kanha in the state of Madhya Pradesh, 18 hours from Delhi, southwest of the Ganges, riding on rails that reach back as long and as straight as the arrow of time.

At the end of the track, the team ran into Hindu tradition, called Rama Navami, a holiday to celebrate renewal and drive out evil.

For Hindus, the tiger is a supernatural force. One God rides a tiger to show that she dominates the most powerful thing on earth. It's their power that makes tigers the ultimate trophy for God and man.

60 Minutes found the Kanha Reserve at the end of the road. It seemed to the team like the Garden of Eden. It's one of India's 28 official tiger reserves, and it's the jewel in the crown. It's one of the few reserves where tigers are still safe and there's still plenty of prey for them to hunt. This is the jungle of Kipling's "Jungle Book," the tale of a boy who slays a tiger.

When Kipling was writing about this jungle, it was a little over 100 years ago. It was the era of the great tiger hunt. One Indian maharaja is said to have killed 1,200 tigers himself. These tiger hunts would go on for weeks and as many as 100 tigers would be taken in a single hunt. These days, in the Kanha Reserve, there only about 100 tigers left.

Before 60 Minutes could search for those last tigers, Belinda Wright insisted on washing her "SUV." It's a 1967 model, with an ample trunk. She calls her "Tara" and in reality, the SUV is an elephant.

In India there's no better vehicle for crashing through the jungle on a tiger hunt; the elephants will go through anything, tearing out brush with their trunks.

Tigers aren't animals you look for with your eyes – they hide behind their stripes very well. Instead you hunt with your ears.

Suddenly, the team heard the alarm call of a deer, indicating that tigers are near.

One tiger emerged, bigger than a lion, painted just the way you thought, only brighter. He didn't seem to care about the elephants, and he didn't notice Pelley and the crew at all.

"They don't recognize us as humans, or as prey," Pelley remarks.

"Even at eyelevel like this. We're not humans. We're just an elephant with a bump on it," Wright explains.

As close as the team was to the tiger, one can understand how vulnerable the king of the jungle is – imagine having guns instead of cameras. That's exactly what Belinda Wright was forced to imagine one day a dozen years ago. She was sitting on a bench outside a tiger park, and a stranger approached with a grisly offer.

"He leaned forward to me and said, 'I've got four fresh tiger skins. Are you interested?' "I looked him straight in the eyes and said, 'I don't think I want any tiger skins but I know somebody who does,'" she recalls. "And I should have, I would have just grabbed him by the neck … and instead I just looked him coolly in the eyes. And I thought, 'Ooh, I'm good at this. They believe me."

And so began an undercover career. She worked with police to set up a sting to catch the skin trader and since then she has been at it full-time. She records evidence on hidden cameras and turns it over to Indian prosecutors. So far, she's taken part in more than 200 busts.

"Every part of the poor tiger is valued so you have the tiger skin market and you have the tiger parts market. There's tiger bone, tiger eyeballs, tiger penis, tiger whiskers, every part of the tiger is used in traditional oriental medicine," she says.

That medicine is consumed mostly in China. And when Wright and her colleagues went to Tibet, they shot undercover pictures showing the skins of tigers and skins of endangered leopards on parade. They traced the smuggling route right back to India's capital.

The heart of that illegal trade is right in a crowded neighborhood in old Delhi and business has rarely been better in part because in newly prosperous China consumers have more money to spend on luxury goods than they ever have before. The traders who work in these neighborhoods actually place orders with the poachers, the poachers fill the orders and the tiger skins get packaged and shipped over the border.

Poaching is so intense, seven of India's reserves barely have any tigers left. In 2005, at a major reserve called Sariska, a reporter discovered that for months no one had seen a tiger. It was a tiger reserve without a single cat.

"We allowed a tiger reserve only a three hour drive from the capital of India, to go and self-destruct," says India's top tiger naturalist Valmik Thapar.

Thapar has written 14 books on tigers. The government asked him to join the special investigation of the Sariska disaster.

"From the confessions I have read of the poachers, it is one of the most shocking stories of how they entered without being checked, how they trapped animals in metal claws, and then at close distance someone would come and shoot them at that point where the skin is not spoiled," Thapar explains.

The investigation showed that park rangers were unarmed and villages had grown up inside the reserves, increasing pressure on the cats. Thapar says the crisis is now so great tigers must be defended by force.

"In some cases you have to give shoot on sight orders," Thapar says.

"What do you mean shoot on sight?" Pelley asks.

"Well you have poachers who carry guns. If you see them, you have to shoot at them," Thapar says.

"You don't arrest 'em? You don't put them on trial?" Pelley asks.

"You can shout and say arrest them," Thapar says. "It's like a war. Because people are out there to loot and plunder. They will kill if you don't kill."

One of the country's top tiger scientists is Joseph Vattakaven. He has spent years tracking the cats with radio collars.

"You feel indebted to the animal that it allow you to follow it for such a long time," Vattakaven tells Pelley.

Indebted, and on this day, worried. Joseph has been following one tiger for a year and a half. But she hadn't killed anything in days and she has two cubs to feed. Tigers will eat almost anything, from porcupines to people. But they have to bring down something the size of a deer about once a week. The tiger had to be starving and the rising sun means it'll be too hot to hunt for the rest of the day.

The team would go looking for her again the next morning, where she had gone for a kill. She had brought down a deer, and the team found her two cubs. They were all having breakfast. Cubs stay with their mother about two years. She teaches them everything. But there was one lesson this guy hadn't learned. Tigers don't climb. But there we were, watching what no naturalist would expect to see: a tiger in a tree.

"It's a very rare thing to see what we saw and he was basically having fun like kids do," Wright says.

That cat stayed in the tree for the better part of the morning and even found a stick to play with.

Down below, mom had no more worries. "She's eaten a lot over a very short period," Wright comments.

While wild tigers are increasingly rare, that doesn't mean tigers are going extinct. There are only 5,000 in the wild, but four times that many in captivity.

"Why not take the twenty or so thousand tigers that are in captivity and breed well in captivity and just reintroduce them into the jungle as they're needed?" Pelley asks Belinda Wright.

"You can't introduce the tiger. You just can't do it. They're born as tiny little helpless animals. They can't see. They can't walk. They're just, you know, tiny little cats. And then they live with their mothers for two years, and she teaches them everything. She teaches them how to hunt. She teaches them how to hide. How to be afraid of people. And how to survive. She teaches them all their skills. And that's something we can't do," Wright explains.

Valmik Thapar fears India's tiger reserves will continue to fail, one after another, until the greatest of all cats is cornered in a last refuge.

"And if we lose the last wild tiger?" Pelley asks.

"For me, life will not be worth living," Thapar says. "If the tiger goes, no campaigner will ever be able to save a forest. He's not gonna save it because of a deer. "

"The tiger is the sentinel," Thapar says. "The tiger is the great symbol that keeps this quality of the natural world alive. Therefore, people like myself will fight for it till the last day I'm alive."
Produced By Solly Granatstein