Few wildlife experts familiar with Cambodia’s ground realities think that exporting wild tigers from India under the 2022 MOU is a good idea.
Last year, India’s former Ambassador to Phnom Penh Devyani Khobragade said the introduction of wild tigers from India would take place this year. Thus far however, there is no sign of it. On being asked for the status of the project, a source in the Indian government responded saying that the “process… has started… but no translocation has happened yet.” They added that India’s Ministry of External Affairs was awaiting reports from India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests.
This apparent delay is not a bad thing; it gives more time to the proposed relocation site – Cambodia’s sprawling Cardamom landscape – to recover in every respect, from prey to protection, before the tigers arrive.
The risk is that the export project could proceed anyway, for diplomatic and geopolitical reasons. Once underway and spun as a landmark conservation initiative, it would be difficult to abandon—leaving the tigers to languish in an enclosure with little hope of release into the wild, or, if they are prematurely released, potentially to die from one reason or another.
Neither a permanently captive situation nor releasing the tigers and risking their lives will serve wildlife conservation or biodiversity restoration objectives. The operation may, on the other hand, become a diplomatic embarrassment and potentially elicit public backlash in India.
“Tigers are not going to arrive in the next 6 to 12 months, but I do think in the medium to long term it (introducing tigers) is possible,” said Thomas Gray, who runs the World Wildlife Fund’s Tigers Alive programme and has 15 years of experience in Cambodia. He is also the lead author of a study on tiger reintroduction opportunities across the species’ historic range.
“I feel the threat of direct poaching of tigers is relatively limited due to the strong law enforcement approach of Wildlife Alliance,” he told me.
Wildlife Alliance is a US-based organisation operating in Cambodia, founded and run by Dr Suwanna Gauntlett, heiress to the Upjohn pharmaceutical fortune, that has been advocating, funding and working on the introduction project for some years.
“There are two big challenges – is there sufficient prey, and sufficiently varied prey, that would support a long-term breeding population?” Gray said. “Those two questions remain unclear.” He added that the landscape has strong potential, but the focus needs to be on scaling up prey recovery with the reintroduction and translocation of sambar and wild pig.
Decimated forests
For perspective, tigers have been officially extinct in Cambodia since 2016; the last confirmed presence of a tiger was in 2007. One wildlife biologist with extensive experience across Southeast Asia told me that possibly the last sighting of a tiger track in the Cardamoms was in 2000, when the track of a single individual was found.
In another measure of the hollowing out of Cambodia’s biodiversity, leopards are considered functionally extinct – they are so few that they do not meet each other and therefore cannot breed. The last major study in 2021 failed to detect any.
Reintroduction of a species in a landscape is a bold and courageous idea. But reintroduction of an apex predator such as the tiger demands specific conditions, such as improving the prey base, forest and wildlife protection, and community outreach. And it could take many years to achieve these preferred conditions.
Data from one comprehensive survey of the relocation landscape by the US-based Global Conservation shows that there is simply not enough large-bodied prey—a prerequisite for tigers—in the intended release area.
The most abundant species revealed by an extensive, 135-camera trap survey were the Asiatic brush-tailed porcupine, lesser mouse deer, Indian muntjac or barking deer, and wild boar.
Lesser mouse deer and barking deer were included in “tiger prey.” But of all of the above, wild boar only barely make the cut as tiger prey. The much larger gaur and sambar, which are more important as staple tiger prey, were scarce, the study concluded. Sambar and gaur were recorded so infrequently that there was not enough data to model their population density.
One wildlife expert I spoke with discounted Global Conservation’s proposition that the density of large-bodied prey in the Cardamoms was comparable to their density in Thailand’s Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, which has tigers. “It’s not a valid statement, not at all,” he said. “Across Huai Kha Khaeng, you have a really well-established prey base from wild boar to sambar to banteng (a large wild bovid) to gaur, that’s why it’s working.”
“In the Cardamoms, you have a few gaur; there are no banteng as far as I know, and hardly any sambar, they have been poached out,” he added.
A deeper problem is the fact that the Cardamom landscape is not an ideal habitat for these large-bodied herbivores that form a crucial part of a tiger’s prey. It is mostly rainforest or moist tropical monsoon forest, which does not have the mosaic of habitats, including crucially, open meadows, that support such large herbivores. “It is never ever going to have a high biomass of the herbivores that would support the tigers,” the wildlife expert said.
And prey is only one issue. Any commitment by the Cambodian government to sustained protection of the landscape would only be as good as its execution, for which Cambodia has little capacity.
Cambodia continues to have one of the fastest deforestation rates in Southeast Asia. According to Global Forest Watch, from 2002 to 2024, Cambodia lost 1.48 million hectares (some 14,800 square kilometres, an area roughly twice the size of Sikkim) of humid primary forest, making up 51 per cent of its total tree cover loss in the same period. The total area of humid primary forest in Cambodia decreased by 34 per cent in that time period.
A September 2025 report in Mongabay revealed that Cambodia has started clearing more than 7,300 hectares (18,000 acres) of protected rainforest in Kravanh National Park to build an irrigation dam. Nearly 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) are to be submerged by its reservoir. Kravanh is part of the Cardamoms landscape.
“Despite being one of the best-preserved forest landscapes still standing in Cambodia, the Cardamoms’ lush rainforests face increasing threats, largely in the form of hydropower projects, with five new dams and their accompanying reservoirs currently being built atop some 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of forest,” the report said.
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Crime and corruption
Cambodia has also been deeply penetrated by Chinese organised crime – and China is a major market for the illicit wildlife trade. “Endemic corruption, reliable protection by the government, and co-perpetration by party elites are the primary enablers of Cambodia’s trafficking-cybercrime nexus and pose the chief barriers to combating the industry’s explosive growth,” notes a May 2025 report by Humanity Research Consultancy.
Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, which scored 180 countries on a scale from 0 (“highly corrupt”) to 100 (“very clean”), ranked Cambodia at 21. It was well below Thailand at 34, and much lower than India at 38.
In 2022, Cambodia’s deputy director of wildlife, Masphal Kry, was apprehended in New York for smuggling endangered wild monkeys into the US. He was one of eight charged, including the director-general of Cambodia’s Forestry Administration.
Essentially, while efforts have certainly been made to address the causes of local extinctions – poaching and habitat loss – they have not been fully rectified. The tigers would be sent into an environment little changed from that in which their predecessors and their co-predators—leopards—met their end.
Some $ 2 million has already been spent on a 0.9 square kilometre enclosed space in Cambodia’s Koh Kong province to house four tigers from India, sustain them with live prey, and eventually release them into the wild.
I spoke with several wildlife experts in Thailand and Cambodia; none were very optimistic about the project.
“Cambodia has not sufficiently addressed the factors that led to the tiger’s extinction in the first place, which includes hunting, snares, deforestation and weak law enforcement,” one of them said.
Only when all the issues are sufficiently addressed should the tigers be brought, he said. To do so before that would be “dangerously irresponsible.”
On or off?
In November 2024, India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) in a post on X said, “A delegation from the @ntcaindia visited Cambodia’s Cardamom Rainforest area and imparted vital training in different thematic areas as part of a capacity building initiative under the MoU signed between the two countries.”
But two open posts on X in recent weeks asking the NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) for an update on the status of the project and requesting to see any studies done by Indian researchers elicited no response.
An email on September 9 to Wildlife Alliance founder and CEO Dr Suwanna Gauntlett, inquiring about the status of the project and whether concerns had been addressed, had elicited no response at the time of writing this.
There is thus no official update on the timeline for the introduction of the tigers in Cambodia.
According to reports, the plan is to translocate one male and three female tigers from India’s Western Ghats. Like all cats, tigers are territorial; how the four tigers used to hundreds of square kilometres of area will coexist peacefully in an enclosure of 0.9 square kilometres is not clear.
Global Conservation’s report concludes that the prey base in the Cardamoms is sufficient, specifically for four tigers. But it’s the only report in the public domain, and may not be definitive. What will happen if the tigers reproduce and multiply?
Moreover, the nearest village to the relocation site is 25 kilometres away, according to Global Conservation. This is not a great distance for a tiger, especially a male, in search of scarce prey. There are several recent examples of tigers walking well over 100 kilometres from their original territories in India.
It would be a matter of time before one of the tigers encounters villagers and their livestock, much as the African cheetahs transplanted to Kuno in India have been visiting villages in search of goats. While cheetahs do not attack humans, tigers are an entirely different order of magnitude.
Then there is the question of snares, which kill everything and have hollowed out Cambodia’s forests – and much of mainland Southeast Asia’s forests. Thousands of snares are removed from the Cardamom landscape every year, but they continue to reappear, says Jeff Morgan, founder and Executive Director at Global Conservation.
But Morgan remains enthusiastic. “Four tigers out of India’s population, as a gift to Cambodia, when they’re that well organized – take the chance even if there’s a little risk,” he said.
He also acknowledges that the reality is challenging. “We’ve been removing miles of snares, and I think Wildlife Alliance, just with its 12 Ranger stations, has confiscated 14,000 chainsaws over the last ten years to get this place stable so that the tigers can be reintroduced,” he said.
“But every year you get another thousand miles of snares.”
There are also worries that the tiger species to be introduced is the Royal Bengal tiger Panthera tigris, and not the Indochinese subspecies Panthera tigris corbetti – now wiped out on the Southeast mainland across Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos and only making a recovery in Thailand’s Western Forest Complex thanks to determined protection.
But in the scheme of things, that is almost moot. If India sends tigers to Cambodia before all the issues are properly addressed with guarantees in place, it won’t matter. The odds against them surviving would be overwhelming.
Nirmal Ghosh, an author and independent writer, has reported from across Asia and North America. He is also a Trustee of The Corbett Foundation and a former member of the Steering Committee of India’s Project Elephant. He tweets @karmanomad. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)