By Joachim Ng
You may have occasionally seen media reports of deadly wildlife-human encounters. A woman at a durian farm in Gerik was trampled to death by an elephant that was probably looking to eat the same fruit. At a stretch of the Gerik-Jeli East-West Highway one year ago, a young elephant calf was mowed down when a sports utility vehicle crashed into it. Tragically on Mother’s Day three weeks ago, a mother elephant saw her calf being struck by a lorry and killed along the same highway at KM80. The mother stood there for five hours mourning the loss of her child. Her tears said it all: “Save my baby,” she cried and cried.
Also in Gerik, a tiger dragged a man from the outdoor toilet he was using into the bushes and mauled him to death. But near the Gua Tempurong rest area of the North-South Expressway, a tiger was knocked down by a trailer and lay dead at the road divider.
What do these tragic incidents mean to anyone who is not directly affected? Every Malaysian should be utterly concerned because the increasing tempo of wildlife-human conflict exposes a horrendous danger threatening human existence – biodiversity loss, as one of the three drivers of the great ecological crisis. The other two drivers are climate change and toxic pollution.
The frequency of human-animal conflicts over the past decade is a clear indication that humans have encroached too deeply into the natural habitats of wildlife, according to the Malaysian Nature Society. “Intrusion of human activities into these animal domains causes the food chain to be distorted,” the Star reported Ecotourism and Conservation Society Malaysia president Andrew Sebastian as saying ((9 May 2023).
NGO Rimau president Lara Ariffin said the tragedy reflects deeper environmental issues, particularly habitat fragmentation and forest encroachment, which are forcing wildlife to cross major roads. “When roads like the Gerik-Jeli Highway cut through forest corridors, wildlife such as elephants and tigers are left with no choice but to cross them in search of food or to reach other forested aress,” she said.
Land clearing for development has driven elephants to venture into plantations and settlements. Elephants consume up to 10% of their body weight in food and can easily eat up to 100kg a day. They roam far in search of food. Additionally, elephants have a natural tendency to return to areas where the herd traditionally roams, which is why they cross highways.
The Consumers’ Association of Penang complained in a letter published in The Star (15 April 2023) that 349,244 hectares of forests were cleared between 2017 and 2021. The timber industry is the biggest driver of deforestation (41.6%) followed by palm oil (15.3%).
In Sabah, 14 pygmy elephants died this year through poisoning, shooting, snaring, poaching, and retaliatory killings after some elephants entered fields to eat crops. These pygmy elephants have lost 60% of their forest habitat in the last 40 years primarily due to logging and the planting of commercial oil palm.
Environment group RimbaWatch has warned that more than three million hectares of Malaysia’s forests are under threat. The last Sumatran ri\hinoceros in Malaysia died in 2019.
To minimise road killings, the Malaysian Highway Authority and Public Works Dept announced last month that all new roads and highways will be designed and built with wildlife tunnels to create safe passages for animals to move from one forest area to another, crossing the highway safely. But shouldn’t construction be the other way around? There should be tunnels for vehicular traffic so that the forest remains intact on as many stretches as possible. It is we humans who are intruding into wildlife habitats and hence it is we who must suffer the inconvenience of having to spend money on carving deep undergound tunnels for vehicular use.
Besides the tiger and orangutan, another Malaysian icon, the tapir, is rapidly vanishing. As of 2020, tapirs have dwindled to as few as 700 to 800, roughly half their population in 2013. Land clearing to make way for agriculture, highways, and mining has created pockets of isolated forests, further jeopardising the survival of tapirs.
In one accident towards end-2024, a tapir met a horrendous death when it was hit by a sports utility vehicle that then dragged it across to the opposite side of the road where it was hit by a four-wheel drive vehicle and its carcass fell into a deep narrow trench. A total of 112 tapirs were killed betrween 2020 and 2024, Wildlife and National Parks Department figures show, resulting in only 700-800 tapirs remaining in their natural habitats.
Commenting on the tragic incident where a tiger was struck dead by a heavy vehicle along the North-South Highway in Gopeng, WWF-Malaysia said the lack of large prey in the forest was a primary factor driving tigers out to seek alternative food sources, including domestic livestock.
Wild boar meat is the tiger’s favourite delicacy – not your chicken or goat. But where are the wild boars now? Tigers enter farms in search of alternative food, but there the farmers await them with their weapons of horrendous destruction. There are fewer than 150 tigers left, whereas in 2013 there were still up to 1,000.
In Borneo during the 1970s there were still 280,000 orangutans, a species that share 97% of their DNA with humans. By 2012 the number had dropped to less tha 100,000. Earlier this year, an orangutan was video-ed roaming the desolate site at a coal mine in Kalimantan across the Sarawak border in search of food. Indonesia has one of the world’s highest deforestation rates.
“Nature is unravelling and the natural world is emptying,” said Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London three years ago when the global wildlife populations had declined by 69% (theSun Oct 14, 2022). It has gotten worse in the past two years with the latest WWF Living Planet Index reporting a 73% loss of wild populations since 1970.
A species of monkey, the pig-tailed macaque, loves rat meat and these macaques voraciously devour rats that are the worst pests in oil palm estates destroying 10% of the crops if left untouched. Macaques living atop oil palm trees act as natural pest control eliminating the need for pesticides. Yet they have been cruelly hunted down, with only 487 left.
Riverbank sand mining has destroyed sandbars and sandy banks along Sungai Perak, with the result that there are no longer sightings of wild river terrapins in Perak for several years. There used to be a lot of terrapins in Sungai Perak, but there is no more place for them to lay eggs. River terrapins, which resemble sea turtles, may become locally extinct.
Other species that are near extinction include the gibbon, slow loris, pangolin, clouded leopard, black panther, sun bear, Bornean banteng or wild cattle, and dugong.
The loss of a single species will have a ripple effect on other animals that are part of the food chain and, subsequently, on the environment. Experts believe animals in fragmented forests are at higher risk of genetic defects because mating options are reduced, increasing the potential for inbreeding and lowering resistance to diseases.
Not many people know that a “critical mass” reduction in any form of wildlife may cause deterioration of the ecosystem to which that wildlife belongs. Tapirs, for instance, are frugivores eating a wide variety of fruits and plants. The seeds that are ingested are later excreted in nutrient-rich droppings. These nutrients are absorbed by soil microorganisms that feed plants Should tapirs vanish, plants will lack nutrients and the entire forest gradually degrades.
Heavy biodiversity loss threatens human survival too because the natural ecosystems essential to sustain human life turn from carbon sink to carbon source emitting high C02 content into the atmosphere, warming the climate further.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ipoh Echo
