Allies for Wildlife: Together for Tigers

We continue to mark 'Allies for Wildlife' with Katie McDonald's (West Midlands Safari Park) piece on the value of zoo education for the sake of tigers:

For May half term 2025, at West Midlands Safari Park (WMSP) we have been staging a ‘Tiger Takeover’. We were lucky enough to have our female Sumatran tiger, Dourga, give birth to three healthy cubs on 17th January this year.

Sumatran tigers, classed as critically endangered, are one of the most threatened animals that we care for at the Park. Therefore, the cubs coming out from their den to coincide with BIAZA’s Love Your Zoo – Allies of Nature, seemed the perfect opportunity to both champion our longstanding partnership with WildCats Conservation Alliance and raise awareness about the plight of wild Sumatran tigers with our guests.

Our annual donations to WildCats Conservation Alliance go towards anti-poaching patrols by Tiger Protection Units in the Kerinci Seblat National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia. This national park contains an estimated 130 tigers – around a quarter of the entire wild population. Sumatran tigers are still illegally hunted for their body parts, caught accidently in snares meant for game, and are suffering from their habitat being taken over for plantations of crops like oil palm trees and coffee.

Our Sumatran tigers are part of an EAZA Ex-situ Programme (EEP), and our partnership with WildCats enables us to align our contributions to the Sumatran tiger EEP with vital support for conservation efforts in the wild.

Part of our Tiger Takeover involves having conservation and education staff at our ‘Conservation Station’ to initiation conversations with guests about tigers. The idea is to work through three key stages:

• ‘Tigers are worth saving’ – this stage is about communicating exciting facts about tigers 
• ‘Tigers need saving’, where the threats to tigers are communicated
• ‘We can save them’ where we talk about conservation measures, we can all participate in.

The cubs are beautiful and seem to delight the majority of those who see them. So, stimulating action from zoo guests should not, one would imagine, be hard. Yet, as everyone who has tried conservation education and worked to ignite behaviour change will know, it is never easy, especially with zoo visitors who have not come specifically for an official education session. 

To be honest it can at times be dispiriting and I have had to start looking at the task a different way.  It is not a failure of an interaction if you have not got a family to download a link to a sustainable palm oil website or app - the desired endpoint of our campaign at our conservation engagement station.

Sometimes just getting a child to tell you ‘tigers have stripes and not spots’ in exchange for a tiger sticker is enough, or so I tell myself! You have started them on a journey. It is really brilliant if you can take a guest through ‘tigers are amazing, here are the threats to them and here is what you can do to shop sustainably and help Sumatran wildlife’, but in a day we find this is rare. 

When it comes to behaviour change it is more positive to look at us as part of a community of educators with a common aim. Guests might learn just a little bit more about Sumatran tigers at WMSP and having done so feel more connected to them. Then they are more likely to take their connection further when going to another zoo, seeing a post on a social media platform or watching a documentary. 

I have had conversations where I have only got as far as explaining to adults that tigers are not in fact female lions! It is easy to be shocked that this was not already known. However, it is only when someone has a better understanding of an animal that they are truly motivated to seek more knowledge and want to help. We have to have faith that others in the wildlife education/zoo community will take up the baton and, in the future, get them to the next level. That is a big part of what campaigns like ‘Love Your Zoo’, or maybe ‘love your zoos – plural', are all about.

- Katie McDonald (She/her) Research & Conservation Officer, West Midlands Safari Park