Thailand credits prey releases for extraordinary tiger recovery

KAMPHAENG PHET, Thailand - In the thick, steamy forests of western Thailand, 20 skittish sambar deer dart from an enclosure into the undergrowth – unaware they may find themselves in the jaws of one of the habitat’s 200 or so endangered tigers.

The release is part of a project run by the government and conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to provide tigers with prey to hunt and eat, which has helped the big cat make a remarkable recovery in Thailand.

The wild tiger population in Thailand’s Western Forest Complex, near the border with Myanmar, has increased almost fivefold in the last 15 years from about 40 in 2007 to between 179 and 223 in 2024, according to the kingdom’s Department of National Parks (DNP).

It is an uptick that WWF’s Tigers Alive initiative leader Stuart Chapman calls “extraordinary”, especially as no other country in South-east Asia has seen tiger numbers pick up at all.

The DNP and the WWF have been breeding sambar, which are native to Thailand but classed as vulnerable, and releasing them as prey.

Now in its fifth year, the prey release is a “very good activity”, says Mr Chaiya Danpho from the DNP, as it addresses the ecosystem’s lack of large ungulates for tigers to eat.

Mr Worrapan Phumanee, a research manager for WWF Thailand, says that deer were previously scarce in the area, impacting the tiger population.

But “since starting the project, we’ve seen tigers become regular residents here and successfully breed”, he says.

Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have all lost their native populations of Indochinese tigers, while Myanmar is thought to have just 23 left in the wild, in large part due to poaching and wildlife trafficking.

Over the past century, numbers worldwide have fallen from about 100,000 individuals to an