In Indonesia, conservationists are hoping to save tigers by giving poachers new jobs
- Mawi learned the art of ‘tiger summoning’ as a boy and became such a prolific hunter, he caught the attention of conservationists, who pointed him to another path
- Now a honey farmer, he helps to convince other tiger hunters to retrain, but Indonesia’s fight to protect wildlife remains a struggle as demand for skin and other animal parts persists
Indonesian villager Mawi, 74, knows all the secrets of ensnaring a full-grown tiger.
For five decades, he risked his life trudging deep into the jungles of South Sumatra’s Kerinci Seblat National Park (TNKS), setting up elaborate traps to catch and kill the animals.
Studying telltale signs of their path, Mawi would look out for claw marks on a tree, faeces, or paw prints, then carve a 20cm hole in the ground and cover it with tree branches. He’d then tie steel ropes across tree trunks so that when a Sumatran tiger crossed the trap, its legs would become entangled.
“The dirt you take out of the hole has to be thrown as far away as possible,” said Mawi, who would leave a similar trap at 10 to 15 different locations. “Tigers know what is fresh dirt and what isn’t. If they know if a hole has just been dug, they won’t walk past it.”
Mawi was well aware of the risks. In addition to the threat of injury or death, he could have been jailed: under Indonesian law, capturing, injuring, killing, storing, possessing, maintaining, transporting, and trading protected animals, whether alive or dead, is punishable by up to five years in prison.
But he had married young and needed to provide for his wife and children. Mawi reasoned that without any land on which to farm, his prospects were limited.