WWF Indonesia believes that the increase in conflict between tigers and humans is as a direct result of deforestation eliminating previous boundaries between their territories.

Last year, conflicts between humans and tigers in Sumatra resulted in 9 people dying and four tigers being slaughtered to help protect villagers.

The tigers can mostly be found in peatland areas and national parks, but they also roam outside those areas, which have increasingly been encroached upon by palm oil plantations, industrial forests and villages.

Land that tiger’s could previously roam freely without encountering people are now being turned into populated areas, which has seen the areas humans and the animals inhabit converge to a point when tigers are now regularly seen in and around villages.

Ligaya Tumbelaka, a veterinarian at Taman Safari Indonesia who monitors Sumatran tiger numbers in the wild, explained how tigers would not normally pose a threat to people.

“They are not man-eaters and would only attack humans for two reasons: because they felt threatened by people trespassing in their territory, or they were too old to hunt for prey and instead wandered into a village in search of food.”

Ineffective policies and weak enforcement of those that are in place has been blamed for the escalation in the conflict.

Hadi S Alikodra, director of species conservation at WWF Indonesia said he believed human-tiger conflicts would continue to escalate because the country still had few pro-conservation policies to protect the natural habitat of the big cats.

“Our policies still focus on economic benefits,” he said.

But the Ministry of Forestry’s director general for forest protection and nature conservation said the government had made significant progress in securing the Sumatran tiger population.

Darori said special enclaves designated for tiger populations had been established in six national parks across Sumatra in order to separate the animals from humans.

“So don’t go roaming around there. That’s their area, people should respect that,” he said, citing an incident last week at a national park in Jambi where a tiger attacked a villager. “If you trespass, you will get attacked. Don’t blame it on the tigers.”

But Hadi said that the recent tiger attacks show that security should be stepped up at national parks in order to ensure tiger habitats were not encroached upon and tigers did not roam into areas settled by humans.

“The central government needs to be more aggressive in approaching local governments to help them, especially in trying to implement best management practices in conservation areas,” he said.

He added that conflict-management measures, such as financial compensation for tiger attacks, should also be brought in to placate villagers and stop them from hunting tigers.

The Sumatran tiger is one of only five remaining tiger species in the world, and is also the most endangered. Hadi said if this situation continued, the Sumatran tiger would soon face the same fate as Indonesia’s two other tiger species, the Balinese and Javan tigers, which were driven to extinction in the 1930s and 1980s, respectively.

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