4

TIGER, TIGER, BURNING BRIGHT

It has been said that seeing a wild tiger is always like a dream, its appearance like a ghost that could fade into a haze of fact and fiction, into the memory of an animal that—like the passenger pigeon or the dodo bird—might once have lived but now requires a large dose of imagination.1 I was reminded of that transient power as I pushed my way through New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport on a warm January afternoon. Fighting between packs of travellers, I rounded a corner and suddenly found myself staring at an enormous photograph of a Bengal tiger. Across the bottom of the billboard, in large white letters, were the words “Incredible !ndia.”

The image seemed both fortuitous and appropriate. India is itself an alpha-beast, a nation at once intoxicatingly beautiful and wildly chaotic, a place where a traveller is as likely to lose his mind as to find enlightenment, where he can swing from euphoria to horror and back again over a span of minutes. On my first trip to the country a year earlier, I had wandered out of my New Delhi hotel at dawn searching for coffee and approached a young man for directions. Just as I reached him, he tipped open a small nylon bag and—in a moment that put the exclamation point in the government’s advertising campaign—a metre-long cobra fell to the ground beside my feet. It flared its neck and revealed what my stunned brain assumed were venomous fangs. “Mister, want to see a snake?” the man asked as I stumbled quickly away.

Later on that trip, I had been enthralled by what had seemed the fantastic world of a children’s book: men rode elephants down sidewalks, monkeys swung from power lines, parrots perched on the roofs of restaurants—a profusion of life that highlighted an easy relationship between Indians and the natural world that contrasted sharply with China.

The tiger seemed fortuitous because I had flown to India in search of the beast. Several months earlier a friend had sent me a report showing how rising Chinese demand for tiger parts threatens the survival of arguably the planet’s highest profile species. Despite a worldwide ban on the international trade in tiger parts under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna—better known by its acronym CITES—investigators from the Wildlife Protection Society of India and the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency had documented a string of Chinese traders openly selling parts and skins. In China’s far west, they found scores of wealthy Tibetans wearing tiger-skin robes and using tents made from their pelts. In majority Han Chinese cities, they found shops offering skins to tourists looking for “prestigious gifts or home décor”. One trader claimed that 80 percent of his customers were Han Chinese. Others reported that customers included local officials and army officers.2

The report laid out the scale of the trade. In 1993, the conservation world had awakened to the rising tide of Chinese demand for Indian wildlife when Delhi police caught a Tibetan smuggling 633 pounds of tiger bones, the remains of what might have been twelve adult animals.3 A decade later, three men were arrested in western China carrying 31 tiger skins, 581 leopard skins, and almost 800 otter skins. Investigators tracked the tigers to India partly because a Times of India newspaper was stuffed inside the cargo.

Other seizures had turned up similarly large stocks of animal parts: thousands of tiger and leopard claws, dozens of skins, hundreds of kilograms of bones. Tallying the pieces, the groups had estimated that nearly eight hundred Indian tigers were poached between 1994 and 2006, a figure that might have been equal to half of the wild tigers remaining in Incredible !ndia.

The report also sketched out the tiger’s dismal state worldwide. In 1900, one hundred thousand tigers are believed to have roamed a region stretching from Turkey east to Siberia and south into the tropical rain forests of Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. As human communities grew, however, they pushed and hunted tigers out of all but slivers of that range. Between 1875 and 1925, at least eighty thousand tigers were killed by hunters in India alone, many of them by British officials and aristocrats.4 By 1950, the world’s tiger population had fallen to forty thousand.5 In 1970, the last Caspian tiger was killed in Turkey, and by the 1980s the species had been exterminated from the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java.

Today, only between three and four thousand tigers remain in the wild and, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the compiler of the Red List of Endangered Species, their habitat is just 7 percent of what it was in 1900.6 Traffic, which is the world’s leading organisation dedicated to studying the trade in endangered species, believes that fewer than 2,500 “breeding adult tigers” remain.7

I was also moved because I had seen the tail end of the tiger trade. Reporting at a warehouse-sized market in Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, in 2003, a traditional medicine trader had offered to sell me tiger bone and promised it could cure a long list of problems. A relative, an American who did business in China, told me about a brick-sized piece of tiger bone a Chinese colleague had given him years earlier. Not wanting to offend his host, he accepted and then packed it away in a shoebox in his suburban American home. Browsing at a store in Wangfujing, Beijing’s most popular downtown shopping street, I came across a book titled Medicated Diet of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Among entries describing the medicinal benefits of consuming turtle shells, human placentas, and pangolin scales was an entry for tiger bone:

TIGER BONE

ORIGIN The bones of Panthera tigris L. family Felidae.

NATURE, TASTE AND CHANNEL TROPISM Acrid and sweet in taste, warm in nature, and attributive to liver and kidney channels.

EFFICIENCIES Expel wind and alleviate pain, strengthen the bones and muscles.

INDICATIONS For rheumatism and flaccidity of the back and lower extremities caused by deficiency of the cold of the liver and kidney. Recently, its prepa-ration of wine and injection are used for rheumatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.

DIRECTION Decoction: 10–15g.8

A few months later, walking through another part of Beijing, I turned a corner and bumped into a stuffed Siberian tiger a shop had put outside to advertise alcohol steeped with tiger bones. On a shelf at the back of the store I found a few dozen bottles emblazoned with photographs of tigers and a paragraph stating that “Balsam Ussuriyskiy is made of extracts from the Ussuri-yskaya Taiga”, a region of eastern Russia that still protects several hundred wild tigers. A pharmacist swore the drink was made with the animals’ bones.

In that case, a few phone calls had proved that the pharmacist was either confused or lying, probably hoping to convince me to pay $100 for a bottle of vodka. But there was ample evidence that Chinese citizens can buy real tiger-bone wine at hundreds of shops across the country despite laws prohi-biting the trade. In 2005, a safari park near Beijing had openly advertised what it called North Big Storehouse Tiger Wine as containing bones from tigers that had “died from fight wounds”.9 A few years later, an official at the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo in northeastern China told a Chinese newspaper that the production of tiger-bone wine was an “open secret” and that the zoo had given bottles to police officers and senior forestry officials tasked with enforcing China’s wildlife laws.10

Across the country, roughly two dozen “tiger farms” bred animals in what appeared to be purely capitalistic ventures, and experts worried that the black-market trade could rapidly push wild tigers over the final edge. Traffic estimated that the twenty-five kilograms of bones in a single adult tiger might sell for $160,000 while other experts put the value of a single pelt at up to $20,000.11 Other parts—from penises, thought by some to boost virility, to eyeballs, traditionally thought to have medicinal benefits—might sell for a few hundred dollars each. Altogether, a single tiger could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and, because the illegal but overlooked sales meant that poachers might be able to pass wild animals off as farmed, ex-perts worried that the trade could lead to increased poaching.12

As I learned more, I also began to see the plight of tigers as indicative of pressures on hundreds and perhaps thousands of species as China’s economy grows. A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime would soon list China as the world’s top consumer of smuggled wildlife products from Af-rica and Southeast Asia.13 Investigations by other organisations found China to be a chief driver—sometimes the chief driver—of wildlife poaching and unsustainable harvesting.

With specific, high-profile species, the evidence was often overwhelming. Just as scientists worried that many of the world’s wild elephants could be killed off within decades, the secretariat of CITES declared China “the most important country globally as a destination for illicit ivory”.14 The world population of wild elephants had fallen from 1.3 million in 1980 to fewer than 500,000 in 2010, and Samuel K. Wasser, a University of Washington biologist, estimated that between 8 and 10 percent of the world’s elephant population were being poached annually.15 An article in Science signed by twenty-seven experts stated that the “scale of illegal ivory trade demonstrates that most of Africa lacks adequate controls for protection of elephants.”16

Rhinoceros were also increasingly threatened. Targeted for their horns, which have been used for millennia by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, it seemed likely that hundreds of animals were killed each year. Shaved or powdered, the horns could sell for up to $20,000 a kilogram—at times making them more valuable than gold, cocaine, or heroin. By conservative estimates, more than seven hundred kilograms of the horns were sold in Asia each year.17 Given that a rhinoceros horn weighs between three-and-a-half and five kilograms, the trade required at least 160 animals, almost one percent of the world’s remaining wild rhinos.18

Sharks provided another high-profile example. Researchers estimate that 73 million sharks are killed each year for the lucrative trade in their fins, which are used to make soups served at top-end Chinese restaurants, weddings, and other special events.19 According to the 2009 IUCN Red List, at least 17 percent of the world’s 1,045 shark and ray species are threatened with extinction. WildAid and Oceana, two advocacy groups, reported that the demand for shark fins tripled between 1987 and 2004 and continues to grow: “A relatively obscure custom of the wealthy from southern China—using the needles of shark fin in soup as an ingredient to add texture, but not flavour—has burgeoned to the point where shark fin soup has become an almost ubiquitous dish at weddings, banquets and business dinners throughout the Chinese world,” the groups stated in a report. “What was once eaten on a special occasion by the privileged few is now regularly eaten by hun-dreds of millions of people.”20

Rising demand had also been partly responsible for attracting organised crime into the world’s last great wildlife sanctuaries. Where poachers once wore flip-flops and used homemade snares, many were now armed with high-tech equipment. “We are now faced with criminal gangs deploying GPS devices, night vision equipment and foot soldiers to track rhinos for days,” Cathy Dean, the director of Save the Rhino International, told a Telegraph journalist. “Highly trained operatives, possibly ex-soldiers, are then being flown into parks by helicopter, and armed with specialised veterinary drugs and darting guns, chainsaws, and automatic weapons.”21

Lower-profile species face potentially graver risks, given that few organ-isations raise alarms about their slipping numbers. John MacKinnon, the former head of the European Union–China Biodiversity Program, has estimated that fifteen hundred varieties of flora and fauna are close to being wiped out in the wild due to demand for traditional medicine.22 The non-profit group Traffic states that demand for Chinese traditional cures is growing at an annual rate of 10 percent and that between 15 and 20 percent of medicinal plants and animals are now endangered.23 Jane Goodall, the primatologist and wilderness advocate, has written that the annual international trade in wildlife has grown to as much as 30,000 primates, 5 million birds, 10 million reptile skins, and more than 500 million tropical fish. A growing portion of that wildlife ends up in China, which some conservationists have likened to a giant vacuum cleaner of the natural world.24

The scale of China’s impact, however, was driven home to me by Wang Song, a zoologist who pushed China’s leaders to join the CITES treaty in 1981 and—over the next two decades—served as one of the country’s chief negotiators to its secretariat. Now seventy-eight years old, Wang had watched the wilderness cleared across most of his country.

When we met at a coffeehouse in eastern Beijing, he did not mince words. “Overuse is the biggest problem,” he said as we sipped Americanos looking out over a small man-made lake. “We use too much of everything: timber, water, animals, everything. The government needs to admit that a lot of our development has come at the expense of the environment.”

Wang was particularly concerned that many Chinese show little concern for the well-being of wildlife and, despite lobbying by experts, that the government had yet to pass laws protecting animals against cruel treatment. In addition to China’s tiger farms, businessmen had set up operations to breed and sell dozens of other species. Some farms raised bears to milk their bile, a traditional Chinese medicine that workers extract by punching holes in the sides of the animals’ stomachs and then inserting painful catheters. Others raised a wide variety of unusual species with commercial value, among them scorpions, crocodiles, heron, musk deer, salamanders, and a range of turtles and snakes.25 Some farms have claimed to be raising the animals for eventual release to the wild, but—like China’s tiger parks—seem more interested in selling their parts, a fact revealed by their location: half are within easy driving distance of Guangdong and Guangxi, southern China’s largest markets for traditional medicine and exotic food.26

“As a CITES negotiator I’ve been to thirty or forty countries over the years,” Wang said. “I’ve met people all over the world. And I often tell them that I’ve never found a nation with a more selfish attitude toward wildlife than we Chinese have. This is not an exaggeration. If we’re going to save any wildlife, we have to be honest about it. Traditional Chinese medicine and our traditional idea that we should eat everything are the problem. If we can’t change our mentality, all of our wildlife, and all of the wildlife in neighbouring countries, will be gone.”

The more I learned, the more it became clear that on top of everything else threatening wildlife—climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, hunting, pollution, the list goes on—China’s rise might mark the end for countless species, and I decided to travel to India to learn how Chinese demand has imperilled arguably the world’s highest-profile creature: if we cannot save tigers, it seemed unlikely that less publicised species would fare any better.

But I was also motivated by a more primal urge: I wanted to see a wild tiger. Partly, I explained my desire in professional terms. Like other top predators, tigers are considered keystone species—species that reside at the summit of an ecosystem and, by regulating herbivore populations, are vital to its health. Starting in the 1960s, scientists had shown that removing predators from an environment often leads to collapse: pull starfish from a tide pool with a healthy collection of barnacles, snails, mussels, and limpets, for example, and the mussels crowd out everything else; remove wolves from American forests and deer begin to kill off favoured plant species; eliminate sea otters from kelp beds and sea urchins take over, eventually destroying a once vibrant community of fish, seals, and seabirds.27 To understand why wild tigers matter, I wanted to see how they protect healthy forests.

Mostly, however, I wanted to see a tiger for purely selfish reasons. For as long as I can remember, I’d been fascinated by the beasts. Growing up in Massachusetts and Kentucky, I sought out stories about tigers. One of my earliest memories was reading a book about an Indian boy forced to surrender his clothing to tigers and how he tricks them into chasing each other around a tree until they are somehow transformed into butter. When my parents took me to zoos, I always sought out the tigers, and I later found Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, where I was enthralled by Shere Khan, the sinister tiger. For me, the quest was largely personal.28

On the morning after I arrived in New Delhi, I plunged into its chaos, flagging down a tuk-tuk, one of India’s three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, and crossing myself as the driver swerved into a river of traffic: regal Ambassador cars built in the 1950s and held together with tape and wire; lines of trucks painted with bright rainbows, images of cows, and the large English words HORN PLEASE; all the cars, motorcycles, and tractors of the modern age. Within the stream of vehicles, scores of beggars eked out crude livings by tapping their bowls against car windows.

I had arranged my trip through Tykee Malhotra, a friend of a friend who had founded a non-profit organisation—named Sanskara—to better protect pockets of India’s remaining wilderness. When I called from Beijing, she told me that she’d started the organisation after learning that a close colleague was contemplating suicide. “Something just snapped,” she told me. “I sat down on the floor and meditated and I reached a different consciousness. I realised life can have more meaning and everything can be more positive.”

Tykee also struck me as a good guide because her story provided a baseline of the changes that have remade India’s natural world over recent decades. She grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in the forested Himalayan foothills of Assam and Darjeeling, where her father managed a British company’s tea plantation. Her family’s house was surrounded by wildlife. Her sister’s first word was haathi, Hindi for elephant, “because every evening there would be elephants around the house and she was told to be quiet so we could listen to them,” Tykee explained. “We weren’t afraid, but we had to be aware that they were there. That’s what our whole life was like over there.” Family pets included a slow loris—a small, docile primate with saucer-like eyes—a pangolin, and a gibbon that learned to fetch her father’s slippers. After a poacher killed a tiger, they cared for its orphaned cubs for two magical weeks.

In the late 1970s, Tykee’s father retired from the plantation and her parents set up a small tourist camp on the eastern edge of Corbett National Park, a sanctuary in northern India that rivals Africa for its wildlife. A set of animal trails ran just behind the resort, and into the late 1980s, they could hear tigers and elephants almost every night from their cabins.

Tykee had asked me to meet her at a restaurant abutting Lodi Gardens, a much-loved park built around the crumbling tombs of fifteenth-century shahs and sultans, and I arrived early to wander through its sprawling grounds admiring monkeys and trying to identify hundreds of colourful birds. The proliferation of life at the centre of New Delhi, the capital of what will soon be the world’s most populous nation (India’s population is expected to overtake China’s sometime around 2025), provided a sharp reminder of the importance of philosophy to the preservation of wildlife. Unlike in China, where wildlife is rare even in remote areas, Indians have maintained an easy relationship with animals for millennia, a fact that explains their proliferation today. Besides being home to half of the world’s remaining tigers, India provides refuge to a majority of Asia’s elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) and protects the only lions outside of Africa—four hundred Asiatic lions (Panthera leo persica), a distant relative of African lions that once ranged across Central Asia and into Greece and Italy.29 More than 1,250 species of birds—more than twice the number commonly found in the United States—live within its borders.

Many of those species spend part of their time around people, and the willingness of Indians to coexist with animals provides a stark contrast to China, where, with few exceptions, there is almost no support for the idea that animals should have their own right to existence. Largely, India has maintained that natural estate because the protection of life is a key concept within Buddhism, the religion that originated in India and was important across the subcontinent from the third century BC until about 1000 AD, and Hinduism, the religion of eight of every ten Indians today.30

When I sat down with Tykee an hour later, she explained that the ideal of coexistence is deeply embedded in the Indian religions and that many animals are considered holy. The Hindu god Durga, for example, is sometimes depicted riding on a tiger, which some Indians believe can create rain and end drought. Ganesh, the Hindu god of wisdom and one of India’s most popular deities, has the head of an elephant. Grey langur are considered incarnations of Hanuman, a deity who served as a disciple to Lord Sri Rama. “Traditionally Indians revered our animals,” Tykee said as we picked at bowls of Tunisian stew. “For many Hindus, killing animals is actually forbidden.”

But India’s massive population, widespread poverty, and growing desire to modernise have begun to shift the balance away from such traditional concepts, and Tykee explained how the country’s natural estate is under increasing pressure. With 17 percent of the world’s people living on just over 2 percent of its land, habitat is rapidly disappearing.31 With growing global demand for wild animals and natural resources, particularly from China, poachers have become increasingly sophisticated and pressure is rising to open protected lands. Many Indian agencies tasked with managing wildlife and wilderness have proven inept and corrupt.

The difficulties faced by India’s ecology were a reminder of the complications of protecting wildlife. As captured by Edward O. Wilson’s HIPPO acronym—habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, population growth, and overharvesting—all species face a range of pressures, and as India’s population continues to grow and its people are exposed to foreign philosophies, that millennia-long cohabitation between communities and wildlife is likely to degrade. Already, poor farmers and herders are pushing into protected habitat, cutting it into increasingly small pockets where animals are segmented into genetic pools that may prove too small to sustain coming generations. Conflict between farmers and animals is increasingly common, and with the problems, some Indians have begun to think of animals less as benevolent spirits than as obstacles to a richer life.

For tigers, however, overharvesting has proven the greatest threat. And—as with most of the world’s commodities—the harvest of India’s great beasts is driven largely by its northern neighbour.

A day before I headed north in search of tigers, I fought my way back through New Delhi’s traffic to talk with Belinda Wright, the founder and director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. Wright had become famous for her powerful advocacy for the protection of wilderness, earning her both committed friends and ardent enemies. She had blasted the government, calling conservation plans mindless and officials negligent, and her work had angered enough poachers and criminal gangs that she had been forced to protect her home with a tall steel fence and security guards.

I expected to meet a woman who was something of a tiger herself—powerful and regal but remote and aloof—but when Wright reached the hotel where we talked I found a woman who reminded me more of a friendly house cat. Her golden brown hair was cut into a bob and her intense blue eyes looked playful and happy. When she talked, which she did almost without pause for two hours, she pumped her hands so rapidly through the humid air that she seemed to be conducting an orchestra.

When it came to tigers, she was blunt. As she saw it, India’s Panthera tigris faced three threats: poaching, habitat loss, and rising conflicts with local communities. Of the three, only poaching could lead to their extinction within her lifetime, and she worried that such a tragic end was increasingly likely.

She was particularly concerned about the speed at which poaching had spread across India. Before 1993, when Delhi police caught a woman carrying the bones of what had probably been twelve tigers, few Indians had considered the possibility that systematic poaching might be a threat.

“Everyone was just sort of shocked,” Wright said as we sipped strong masala tea. “We thought that there wasn’t any serious poaching because there wasn’t demand for tiger parts in India. People thought there was no way China can be having such an impact on our wildlife because traditionally China and India have been adversaries. But what they’d forgotten is that India and China have traded salts and spices and other things for thousands of years on the old Silk Road. The poachers were using the same routes and couriers to go into new products, and one of those products happened to be wildlife.”

The increasing participation of criminal gangs had also modernised the industry. Even a decade ago, Indian poachers had hunted primarily with homemade snares and wooden spears. Now they were using high-tech weapons. “I’m just shocked by how efficient the poachers are, how knowledgeable they are, and that there is nothing in place by the government that can truly address this huge threat,” Wright said. “It’s terrifying what they know and how determined they are. For the most part these poachers are illiterate. They look impoverished. They dress in rags. They beg when they’re travelling and things like that. But most of them have hefty bank balances and insurance policies and all sorts of things. That’s how they operate. They’re very, very smart.”

The other problems—habitat loss and rising conflict with farmers—may prove more difficult to combat in the longer term, but because they do not directly target tigers, conservationists and officials have time to create wildlife sanctuaries and move problem animals. In contrast, “poaching is the one thing that can just wipe out an entire population over a very short period of time,” Wright said. “It’s just voom, and suddenly they’re gone.”

And, of course, the poachers are set in motion by consumers. When I asked Wright how China fit into the picture, she threw up her arms and, for the first time, looked unhappy. “If the demand from China for tiger bones doesn’t stop, I have no idea how we’re going to save the last wild tigers,” she told me.

Together with a handful of other environmental groups, the Wildlife Protection Society of India had done more than any government agency to understand the dynamics of the trade, and they had found that almost every tiger poached in India was sent north. “In the 1980s, the tiger bone trade hit India big time, but that was really just the beginning,” Wright said. The next stage came in the 1990s as China poured money into its far western regions to develop infrastructure and industry and tamp down political unrest. As Tibetans became wealthier, they began to buy skins.

The Tibet connection often surprises Westerners, who tend to think of Tibetans as protective of the natural world because of their Buddhist beliefs. But historically Tibetans have both protected and appropriated the natural world. Many Tibetans refuse to kill animals but willingly wear skins and eat meat. Tibetan nomads, who have no history of using banks, buy expensive, easily transportable items as a way to store wealth. Even today, many Tibetan women wear large amounts of expensive jewellery, often gold necklaces and earrings fitted with valuable stones. For men, tiger skins had become similar symbols of power and stores of value.32

“The skin trade in Tibet was created just as Tibetans began to make more money and could afford them,” Wright said. “It just became a fashion. It could have been Rolex watches but instead it was skins.” By the time she travelled through Tibet in 2005, the trade had become widespread. Over six weeks she saw eighty-three fresh tiger skins, the remains of more tigers than she will ever see alive.

The trade shifted again after the Dalai Lama, a godlike figure to most Tibetans, called on his followers to discard robes decorated with the pelts of wild animals. Countless Tibetans burned such clothing. But the underground trade had been established, and, instead of shutting down, the criminal gangs began marketing in the much larger and richer communities in eastern China.

“The traders were very upset that skins had stopped selling in Tibet, so they went out and found Han who wanted skins for decorations and for expensive gifts to give their bosses and so on,” Wright said.

India’s creaking bureaucracy was the problem’s third leg. As Wright and a dozen other conservationists I talked with saw things, the Indian government had proven incapable of effectively protecting its wilderness areas. Many pointed to an incident a few years earlier in Rajasthan, a state west of New Delhi. In late 2004, news broke that twenty-six tigers living in the Sariska Tiger Reserve, a sanctuary twice as large as California’s Redwood National Park, had disappeared. A government official had reported a steep decline in a reserve census and called for stepped-up government protection, but the entreaty had been lost amid the endless paperwork of the Indian state. In the middle of the year, a local man gave authorities details about a gang of poachers operating in the park, but the information sat in the system for seven months. Only after scientists reported the absence of tiger signs—scat, claw markings, and pugmarks, the technical term for tiger tracks—and the press picked up on the story did the government act. But by the time the poachers were caught, they had killed all of the reserve’s tigers.

“I just don’t think India can protect its tigers,” Wright said as she leaned across a tiny glass table. “The demand is too big. The price is too high. The tiger is too valuable dead. It has very little value alive.

“In India we have this philosophy that whatever’s there will always be there. No one can actually come to terms with the fact that something might actually disappear. That’s why Sariska was such a huge shock. It showed that, in the end, India is like a supermarket for the illegal wildlife trade.”