Travel funding for this project was provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. On a late afternoon in early October 2023, Pisie Amud, 25, took his blowpipe and left his house in the Indigenous Temiar settlement of Pos Pasik, in Malaysia. Amud’s two brothers had declined his invitation to accompany him, so he struck out on his own for the hilly oil palm plantations nearby. “He didn’t say where he was going,” his wife Syahira binti Hamid, 22, recalled. “He just hopped on his motorbike and left. I thought he was going into the rainforest to hunt squirrels and birds.” By eight, his dinner was on the table, but he had not returned. “Usually, he came back by seven,” Syahira said. “Even if he was not successful, he always returned by that time.” At dawn, after a sleepless night, Amud’s father and brothers assembled a search party. No one knew where he went or where to start looking. As the sun was going down, they found his motorbike parked in an oil palm plantation with tiger paw prints and flattened vegetation nearby. Something big had been dragged down through the underbrush toward a river. One of Amud’s brothers found his body, but one arm, part of his torso and part of his skull were missing. Expecting the tiger to return, men from Pos Pasik held vigil over the body throughout the night, blowpipes and spears by their sides. When the big cat returned around 4 a.m., they set off firecrackers to drive it away. The tiger would evade capture for another six weeks before being caught and sent to the National Wildlife Rescue Centre. “We can’t remember any time before this when anyone has ever been killed by a tiger here,” said Jeffrey anak Berkut, an elder in this Indigenous Temiar village. It’s a comment I’d hear repeated by the families and neighbors of every recent fatal tiger attack victim in the nation. Tigers have killed five people in Peninsular Malaysia since 2022, including four people last year. Two of those deaths occurred within a 10-kilometer (6.2 mile) radius in a 48-hour period. Why now? “There are many causes coming together to bring on this increase in tiger attacks,” said Hafiz Nasarudin, president of KUASA, an environmental NGO. But at their heart, the fatal tiger attacks reflect another conflict, he points out. Pos Pasik, in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, is on the frontline, peacefully resisting the seemingly relentless advance of loggers clearing the forests for the expansion of massive oil palm plantations. Deforestation for palm oil production has driven steep increases in greenhouse gas emissions from raised forests and peatlands, and also destroyed vast areas of critical habitat for endangered species. From 2002 to 2023, according to Global Forest Watch, loggers cut down a fifth of Malaysia’s primary forest—2.93 million hectares (7.24 million acres)—an area larger than the U.S. state of Vermont. Habitat loss led to the extinction of the Sumatran rhinoceros in Peninsular Malaysia around 2007 and the species was declared extinct in all of Malaysia in 2015. If the forests continue to fall, environmentalists worry a similar fate may await the Malayan tiger. “Deforestation has led to forest fragmentation,” said Nasarudin. “Non-compliant loggers are cutting down big trees outside the bounds of their logging concessions. They remove large ‘mother trees’ that produce lots of seeds and fruit—food for prey species like deer, serow etc. That means less food for the apex predator, tigers.” “But a bigger problem is an outbreak of swine flu,” he added. In 2022, wild boar, prime tiger prey, began dying en masse from a strain of swine flu that is nearly 100 percent fatal to them. In the 1950s, there were an estimated 3,000 Malayan tigers (Panthera tigris jacksoni) in Peninsular Malaysia. By 2020, the number of the big cats had decreased to an estimated 130 to 140, which landed the tiger sub-species on the International Union of Conservation of Nature Red List, which lists them as critically endangered. So, hungry tigers have been emerging from their shrinking and fragmented rainforests in search of livestock. Sometimes they encounter people instead. The Fight to Connect Forest Habitats Anek bin Along, 59, of Kampung Sau, was planning a Temiar harvest festival for the village. “His house was full of people getting ready,” said headman Ala anak Asu, 39. “The tiger came right up to the house and took him from behind, biting him in the back of the neck after he stepped out to pee, because someone was using the bathroom. Three or four men grabbed spears and ran after it with dogs but it was too late.” Because tigers have brazenly approached dwellings, villagers here still feel traumatized. They never enter the forest alone because, although that particular tiger was put down after charging wildlife officers armed with automatic rifles, tiger tracks are still appearing around the periphery of the village. In Pos Pasik, a tiger regularly roars at night in the nearby forest, keeping the community on edge. Gua Musang, or “Palm Civet Cave” in Malay, is a small city set within limestone karst mountains in Kelantan. It used to be famous for the so-called “Jungle Train” that stopped there, but a more appropriate name nowadays might be the “Oil Palm Train.” Before Hafiz Nasarudin turned the truck we were traveling in off the paved north-south road into Temiar territory, he passed a dozen logging trucks, their trailers piled high with tropical hardwood. Hafiz turned west toward distant blue mountains, the so-called Central Forest Spine, filling the air behind us with orange dust that rises from the unpaved road during the dry season. The silt-choked Betis River the paved highway had just passed over had the same carrot color. For several miles after he turned, oil palm plantations crowded the road, and Hafiz occasionally yielded to trucks overflowing with fruit from oil palms or timber. As he drove farther, the source of that timber became more apparent. What had been a jungle now had the barren look of a construction site. Tracks gouged out by bulldozers lacerated the woods, extending out of sight. Branches dangled from dying trees, and the exposed tropical subsoil would be washed down to the Betis River by the next afternoon shower. The orange logging roads spread like veins over the hills where the logging companies had extracted every large tree of value. This is the traditional land of the Temiar people, and had been prime tiger habitat. In 2005, multiple Malaysia central government natural resource and forest management agencies, with support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), came together to launch the Improving Connectivity in the Central Forest Spine (IC-CFS) initiative. The prime goal of the initiative is preserving a 300 kilometer (186 mile) swath of near-continuous forest from Royal Belum State Park, on the Thai border, along the Banjaran Titiwangsa mountains that runs down the middle of the peninsula and east to Taman Negara National Park. These forests provide sanctuary for the Malayan tiger and other endangered species like the Malayan tapir, Asian elephants and Malayan sun bears. It’s a national plan to combat forest fragmentation and maintain wildlife corridors by preserving the connection between various forest complexes, including with the construction of wildlife crossings that allow tigers, bears, elephants and other large animals to safely pass underneath busy highways. Viaducts for animals are critical to keeping migration corridors connected, but only if animals can find them. In May and June 2024, tigers that inhabit the Central Forest Spine were killed by automobiles on divided expressways, one near Bentong, Pahang and another near Tapah, Perak. Neither accident site had a wildlife viaduct within tens of kilometers in any direction. However, the bigger challenge to keeping habitat connected for tigers and other wildlife is bureaucratic. The IC-CFS is a central government initiative, but Malaysia is a federation in which each individual state controls its own forest management policies. The central government’s forest connectivity initiative passes through three states—Perak, Kelantan and Pahang—each with different forest management priorities. For instance, in Kelantan, where the forest corridor between the Banjaran Titiwangsa mountain range and Taman Negara spans a valley crisscrossed with busy highways and expanding monocrop plantations, effectively creating a choke point, environmentalists suggest that the cord of connectivity has already been severed by the expansion of massive oil palm plantations and new plantations for durian fruit. “I Wouldn’t Be Unhappy if There Were No More Tigers” Not all tiger attacks are fatal. Adin Ando, now 50, of the Temiar settlement of Kampung Badak, in the Central Forest Spine, was clearing weeds from his plot of manioc in the afternoon of July 5, 2021. “I looked up and noticed, 15 meters away, a tiger staring at me,” Adin said. “It looked like a juvenile because it wasn’t so big.” “We stared at each other for 15 minutes,” he said. He stood motionless with his parang, a Malaysian style of machete, in hand. “I prayed to the Guardian of Nature (a Temiar deity).” The tiger slowly approached. “I thought, I have to be brave,” he recalled. The tiger lunged at him, and he used both his hands to block it with his parang in its chest. The tiger pushed him onto his back on the ground. It sunk its teeth into his right arm, then bit his head. Adin struck the tiger in the forehead with his parang as hard as he could. The cat turned to flee, but one claw caught Adin’s left eye, leaving it permanently blind. Hearing his screams, Adin’s brother-in-law, Adik bin Angah, ran to him with his hunting dogs. “I was shocked by what I saw,” Adik said. “He was all covered in blood.” Adik helped Adin back to his house, where he left him in the care of his wife while he went to the neighboring village, where there was a satellite phone to call the hospital. Hours later, an ambulance finally arrived to transport a half-conscious Adin to the hospital, where he would remain on oxygen for five days. A Kelantan Wildlife and National Park Department trailcam, set up two days after the attack, recorded a tiger roaming the area. Ten days later, a female tiger with a gash to her forehead, likely from Adin’s parang, was trapped and transferred to the National Wildlife Rescue Centre. “As time goes by, we feel less afraid”, Adin said, “I wouldn’t be unhappy if there were no more tigers.” New Threats From Development; an Ancient Menace in the Forest If the Temiar are geographically unlucky, with no protected status for the core of their traditional land, the Batek would seem to have had some good fortune because part of their territory sits within the 434,300 hectare (1.1 million acre) rainforest of Taman Negara National Park, the most diverse ecosystem on the planet. Believed to be 130 million years old, it is one of the oldest forests on Earth, providing habitat for the Malayan tiger, Asian elephants, Malaysian gaur (the world’s largest wild cattle), tapir, gibbons and monkeys—a total of more than 200 species of terrestrial animals, 300 species of birds, 1000 species of butterfly and 14,500 species of flowering plants and trees. The Batek, an Australo-Papuan people, are believed to be the descendants of the first human migrants to arrive in Southeast Asia from Africa 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. Now, these former nomads live semi-settled lives in villages—Kuala Koh and Aring 5—pushed up against the national park’s northern boundary, surrounded not by rainforests, but by palm oil plantations. And the Batek in the state of Kelantan have emerged far from unscathed in their contact with powerful outside forces. Forty years ago they lost the northern third of their land to the same process that is unfolding in Temiar territory now. “I remember that (logging) had started in the lower Lebir valley by 1973. Apparently, it moved slowly up the river, though we didn’t see it in 1975-1976,” Kirk Endicott, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Dartmouth University, told me in 2019. “But when I went there in 2004, the entire area outside Taman Negara had been logged off and replaced by plantations.” He described the process in a 1979 academic paper: “This is not scientific logging, designed to preserve immature trees and promote reafforestation; it is undisguised plunder. First the valuable trees are found and felled. Bulldozers follow, cutting temporary tracks to the downed trees…The operation advances through the forest at a rate of several miles per day, leaving a trail of utter destruction. No care is taken to prevent damage to other trees, (nor) soil erosion.” Not much has changed in nearly a half century. When I first encountered the Batek in Kuala Koh in 2010, the settlement was adjacent to a buffer forest, but a year later, I documented loggers surveying the buffer forest and setting up markers. The Batek were told that the forest would be selectively logged. When I returned in 2015, the forest had been leveled and replaced by an oil palm plantation. The following year, without consulting the Batek according to tribal headmen, a manganese mine broke ground above their primary water source. Toxic runoff from the mine made the fish caught in the river inedible. Then, in 2019, a measles epidemic raged through Kuala Koh. In the past, the nomadic Batek would have pulled up stakes to escape a spreading infection. But, with multiple families living in concrete houses, many weakened by malnutrition, the illness bore down hard. Sixteen people out of a community of roughly 180 died and another 100 were hospitalized. Many Batek are still convinced that toxins leaching from the mine into their water was the true cause of the illness. On top of the new hazards the plantations and mine pose to the Batek are the threats they have always faced in the forest. On May 8, 2023, a party of eight people from the Batek settlement of Aring 5 set up camp at the edge of the Aring River inside Taman Negara National Park. The next morning Halim Asin, 27, set out with his 8-year-old nephew, Alang Kuang, to catch some fish. “He was always cautious with animals,” Halim’s father, Asin Parang, 69, said, “especially since there have been increased sightings of tigers recently.” Despite his wariness, at 11:30 a.m., a tiger pounced on Halim from behind. Alang escaped by jumping in the river and swimming away. When he reunited with the rest of the group, they raced back to Aring 5 so that they could contact police. “Suddenly, my grandson ran up to me shouting, ‘My uncle has been eaten by a tiger!’” Parang said. They assembled another group and returned to the site of the attack to see if they could retrieve Halim’s body, but couldn’t find it, Parang said. “I think the body might have washed down the river or maybe the tiger dragged it into the forest,” he said. “It was very quiet.” Knowing an aggressive tiger was nearby, the party decided staying after dark to continue the search was too risky and they returned to the village. Four days later, Halim’s body was discovered by a rescue team, face down, curled up and stuck on a tree stump two kilometers (1.25 miles) downstream. “This is the first time anyone’s been killed by a tiger here,” Halim’s father said, repeating a now-familiar refrain. New Technology Joins Ancient Teachings to Protect Wildlife While living beside Taman Negara National Park has presented the Batek some advantages, the Jahai, another formerly-nomadic, Australo-Papuan people, are perhaps the most fortunate of all Malaysia’s Indigenous peoples. Ardi Kembong, a Jahai tribesman, squatted to place a river-smoothed stone on the ground during a bushcraft training session deep within the untouched old growth forests of Royal Belum State Park in Perak, along the Thai border— the Jahai’s legally protected land. “In the beginning of time, there was only a stone,” he began, using a stick to point at the rock. “This stone was surrounded by swamp. There were no trees, and the Jahai deities told our ancestors to stand on the stone. People from the outside could not get to it. Our ancestors were safe.” Royal Belum State Park, established in 2000 and only officially mapped in 2007, covers 117,500 hectares (290,350 acres) on the upper reaches of Lake Temenggor, which was created by damming the Perak River in 1974. Then the deities impaled a stick onto the rock, Ardi explained, which grew into a tree, then a forest. “Then animals came to live with them,” he said. Even today, the Jahai believe that cicadas, bats, hornbills and many other animals can transform into humans and are regarded as faunal siblings. “The deities made us responsible for the forest and that is why this work is so important.” Ardi is a member of one of the people’s, or “Menraq,” anti-poaching units. “You do not have to be a scientist to be a conservationist,” said Harun Rahman, an environmental filmmaker turned project leader for the Menraq anti-poaching project, which was founded by the Malaysian NGO, Rimau, in partnership with Perak State Parks Corporation. “Sixty percent to 70 percent of tigers in Royal Belum State Park were lost in a sweep by poachers between 2015 and 2016,” Rahman continued. “By 2024, there were just an estimated 11 tigers left in the park. “The state park was struggling to get enough boots on the ground,” he continued. “We sat down with the (director of the Perak State Parks Corporation) at the time… and came up with the idea of hiring the (Jahai), living within the park, to help in patrolling. ‘Hire local Indigenous peoples to help in conservation efforts,’ he said. It was a win-win-win.” But the Jahai were skeptical. Village elders insisted that, for their young men to join the anti-poaching unit, they would get not just wages, but better health care, a more stable food supply, clean water and better education for their children. “Literacy is a major challenge,” Rahman said. “How do you teach someone to use a GPS when they can’t read?” Roughly 10 percent of adults in Rimau village are literate. But Rimau hopes to train the next generation of anti-poachers, so the education in the village can’t just be in traditional bushcraft. So over the course of three days each May, teachers are invited in to hold workshops with the Jahai children to measure their educational progress using reference points they could relate to, like the number of fruits hornbills bring to their young. Children came from villages spread out along the lake’s shores to Rimau’s rainforest headquarters in Royal Belum to attend the three-day Menraq Muda (youth program). On the first day, engaging the introverted children was a challenge, even for Malaysian teachers. Until recently, the Jahai rarely mixed with outsiders, and there was a long history of discrimination, and even kidnapping and forced labor, by more powerful ethnic groups. When several boats transporting the teachers came ashore, most women fled out of sight as the outsiders climbed up from the water’s edge to the small, open-sided school. A few children cried at the sight of the delegation of teachers, but as the days went by, they became more comfortable with the newcomers. Children were given markers to color in pictures of rainforest animals, flowers —and lollipops—as the teachers tested each child’s reading and math skills. Finally, their height and weights were measured so that all this could be used to compare to children in cities and towns throughout Malaysia. Jahai people traditionally navigate the rainforest by following watersheds, and the points of the compass are a completely foreign concept. But reading a compass and GPS device can mean the difference between life and death when mixing with tigers and stealthy poachers. So in addition to traditional bushcraft navigation skills, an instructor guided the Menraq members on how to find north on a compass. Each patrol unit carries a GPS device and a satellite phone, which are formidable tools when combined with the Jahai’s extensive forest skills and allow mapping of the movement patterns of poachers and wildlife. But bushcraft training is also critical, as the Jahai’s more settled lives has led them to lose some of their jungle skills. “Once you lose forest knowledge you might not be able to get it back,” Rahman said. “Poachers have survival forest skills to live for weeks. They can match Jahai forest knowledge.” Poachers enter Malaysia across the porous Thai border in Royal Belum, but also fly in from Vietnam and Cambodia on tourist visas. “Poachers travel alone with one dog as a warning system and usually kill the dog at the end of the poaching trip,” Rahman said, noting that dogs are considered disposable equipment like the snares and spears that could incriminate them. Use of simple tools helps them avoid detection. Heavy metal cables are used as snares and, if a tiger is captured, poachers use a spear to kill the animal because a gunshot can be heard for miles. “All poachers, thus far, who have been arrested, were unarmed (with guns),” Rahman said. Members of the Menraq patrol unit had a different reception than the teachers when they climbed out of their boat in Kampung Sungai Mes and walked through the village greeting people at houses made of concrete or bamboo. A couple of pet baby macaques were tied to long leashes, likely the offspring of mothers taken by Jahai hunters, as we passed first through swidden farming fields and into the trees, where a forest of mushrooms sprouted from elephant dung. Ardi Kembong and Talib Mat Razi, Menraq members from the village, led the patrol with Latif Yosoff, a local Rimau resident, advising them as they moved trail cameras in an area of rainforest crisscrossed by animal trails. Talib worked with patrol members to ensure a level line of sight for reinstallation of the cameras, one facing the other, while Ardi documented location coordinates, dates, times and details of the site. Menraq’s camera traps have captured stills and video of tigers, serow, gaur and, in one instance, an elephant destroying another camera. The trail cameras have also photographed poachers at work, helping Menraq members learn about their techniques. After they showed footage of the wildlife and poachers along the southern boundary of Royal Belum National Park to the director of the Perak State’s Forestry Department, the department changed the area’s designated use from timber harvesting to wildlife conservation. Such designations make little difference to poachers, however, and Rahman said the Menraq see evidence of illegal hunting in the area on a weekly basis. “Our goal is for the Jahai to one day take over the running of the patrolling operations from us,” Rahman said. “Dare we hope that one day the Jahai run the state park?” The anti-poaching work, however, is urgently needed now. On June 29, 2024, Rimau posted on its Instagram account a photograph of a dead Malayan tiger floating in the Pergau River in Kelantan. It was near the site where two tiger attacks the previous November claimed the lives of migrant oil palm workers from Myanmar and Indonesia within 48 hours of each other. Tigers are strong swimmers, so it is highly unlikely that it drowned. The cat showed no outward signs of injury. Vincent Chow, president of the Malaysian Nature Society, told the Star newspaper he believed that the tiger was “most likely poisoned.” The tiger’s carcass was brought to the National Wildlife Rescue Centre (NWRC), but the autopsy conducted there was inconclusive about the cause of death. There were no signs of trauma, either external or internal, on the tiger. “We suspect (the tiger) was poisoned but that can mean accidental, not intentional, poisoning,” Harun Rahman of Rimau speculated. But with so few left in the Malaysian wild, every tiger death is as viral in the news and on social media—as are fatal attacks on humans by the last of the big cats.