Honorary Tiger, by Duff Hart-Davis<br/>The Last Tiger, by Valmik Thapar

In the forests of the night

Are any tigers left in the wild? Yes, indeed. I saw two in November in India. One in the south in the shadows, beside me. One in the north, climbing out of a pool, shaking itself like a dog.

But they need protection. A new market has arisen for India's tiger skins, and a well-organised poaching mafia is happy to oblige. Hundreds of skins are smuggled in lorries from Delhi through Nepal to Lhasa, and bought by Tibetans, newly rich from selling caterpillar fungus to China for medical purposes (don't ask), to wear at festivals.

This November, poachers admitted shooting 22 tigers (out of 30) in Ranthambore, Rajasthan. "The tiger cries until it dies," the ringleader said when caught. Sariska, the neighbouring reserve, has lost all its tigers; Panna in Madhya Pradesh has lost half; 12 out of India's 27 reserves are in ruins.

In Sumatra, Russia, South-east Asia, the Himalayas, there is also the burgeoning Chinese market for bone. China is the villain of the tiger's story. Its demand for animal parts drives the illegal Asian wildlife trade. Chinese medicine uses tiger bone (officially banned) as an analgesic, and tiger parts for everything from piles to impotence. Yet all over Asia people are fighting heroically to save the tiger. Among them are, in India, Billy Arjan Singh and Valmik Thapar.

The former is the subject of Honorary Tiger, the affectionate biography of a remarkable man which illustrates problems of tiger conservation in the Seventies and Eighties. The latter has fought for tigers politically for 20 years. He sits on the committee of India's Supreme Court which investigates the abuse of forest land. He is in despair. Through historical narrative, letters and political memoranda, The Last Tiger tells the story of India's tiger conservation until October 2005, and shows the bloodiest battles for the tiger are against its legal protectors.

Tigers will never be extinct biologically. They breed fine in captivity. Americans buy them on the net (See terrificpets.com). There are twice as many in Texan cages as there are wild.

It is wild tigers that are endangered. Does this matter? Again, yes: "saving tigers" means saving where tigers live, which affects all of us in the end. Tigers need water, forested land, and 50 deer-shaped animals a year each.

A forest of 30 tigers needs 2000 spare deer, who themselves need vegetation, which in turn needs pollinators (birds, civets, insects, monkeys). If you save tigers, you save the whole thing down to the smallest butterfly.

Saving tiger forests is in the long-term human interest. Forests protect water sources. Asia's monsoon-fed rivers would otherwise rage over eroded banks. But we are terrible short-termists. Deforestation for agriculture and mining causes drought, flood and famine; it is also the chief cause of tiger decline. When forests went, tigers disappeared from Bali in the Thirties, Java and the Caspian in the Seventies, south China in the Eighties.

In 1972, Indira Gandhi saved India's tigers from this. Tiger saving needs political will, which she had in spades. Thapar records how shooting was banned, tigers became India's national animal, protection laws were passed, a body called Project Tiger was appointed to administer tiger reserves. But, against Arjan Singh's advice (as Hart-Davis describes), Mrs Gandhi made Project Tiger part of the forest service. Both books show the reason India is now losing its national animal is the forest service's mismanagement of wildlife.

The aim of forest management is making money. Wild animals make none, except indirectly via tourism. They need protecting from poachers and human disturbance. But doing things to forests, like permitting mining, logging and roads, does make money.

In 1978 Arjan Singh (now 87) was persecuted by one forest officer; Thapar describes others persecuting anyone who exposes poaching. India has two tiger biologists. They are internationally admired. Forest officials have denied them research permits.

Thapar, believing tigers depended on the goodwill of those who lived beside them, began social initiatives to show tigers could benefit people. The chance of goodwill has passed; Thapar now says forests must be policed by armed guards. People must be separated from tigers for the safety of both. But India is currently debating a "tribal bill" to give land to all human forest dwellers, which would wreck forests from within. And, as Thapar shows, destroy tribal society too.

India, as everywhere, has many injustices. Destroying remaining forest land (3 per cent of the whole), and tigers with it, will not solve them.

The main problem is denial. Thapar brings up to date the jealousies, corruption and mismanagement which Arjan Singh fought. In the Nineties, Project Tiger's previous director P K Sen scandalised the forest service by publicly acknowledging the scale of poaching. His successor said he was wrong. Officials say lost tigers have "migrated". Tigers do not migrate: they stay in territories they fight for. Specious explanations cover up failure - and poaching.

Project Tiger is paying for a costly update to its way of counting the tigers that it denies are vanishing. Every institution connected with protecting tigers, says Thapar, "requires reform".

Official denials that India's tigers are disappearing may seem small beer compared to America's denial of global warning; or Britain's, of its reasons for war. But it has turned tiger protection, says Thapar, into "a shambles".

Yet India is the tiger's only real chance. About 450 live in Sumatra, another 450 in Far East Russia (and north-east China). They are dwindling in South East Asia. Most of the rest are in India and Nepal. In 2001, India had 3000; today it is probably half that.

It is not too late. Tigers are resilient animals. If India protected them properly, it could have 20,000. But in Delhi, when November's poaching scandal broke, I asked P K Sen, who now works for WWF, if tigers had a future in India.

"No!" he said. "No future!"

As the man said, the tiger cries until it dies.

Ruth Padel's 'Tigers in Red Weather' is published by Little, Brown