Bengal Tigers May Return to Cambodia
The Plan Raises Big Questions
Cambodia has no wild tigers left. The last one was caught on a camera trap in 2007. In 2016, tigers were declared extinct in the country. Now there is a plan to bring them back.
India wants to gift Cambodia a small group of Bengal tigers. The cats would be released into the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest. This forest once held wild tigers. People who live there still remember them. One farmer named Sat Born saw a tiger near his village in 2001. He froze. He says its head was huge.
Bringing a species back sounds like good news. Many reintroductions do work. But scientists who study tigers are worried about this one. Here is why.
Not enough food
Tigers need a lot of prey to survive. One adult tiger eats about one deer-sized or cow-sized animal every week. A mother tiger with cubs needs even more. To keep a forest full of tigers, the prey must be plentiful and stable.
A 2020 study looked at the Cardamom Mountains. It found a real risk that there is not enough prey to support a healthy tiger group. The study gave less than a 25 percent chance that the area could hold 25 adult tigers. A tiny group of five might survive, but small groups become inbred and often die out. Carnivore biologist Ullas Karanth puts it simply. Dumping tigers into an empty forest does not work.
The same threats are still there
Poaching wiped out Cambodia's tigers the first time. Hunters used snares, guns, traps, and even land mines. One hunter admitted to killing more than 600 animals, including 19 tigers. Tiger parts are still sold on the black market today. Snares still fill the forests. In 2023, the Indochinese leopard was declared functionally extinct in Cambodia too.
The forest itself is shrinking. In 2024, Cambodia lost more than 93,000 hectares of forest, about half of it inside protected areas. Five new hydropower dams are going up in the Cardamom Mountains. One sits just 7 kilometers from the planned tiger release site. Roads and dams open quiet forest to loggers and poachers.
Are these even the right tigers
The tigers that once lived in Cambodia were the Indochinese type. The new tigers would be Bengal tigers from India. Scientists still debate whether these count as separate subspecies. Some say all mainland Asian tigers are one group. Either way, the new cats would not be the exact same tigers Cambodia lost.
The people who live there
Maybe the biggest question is about the families who call this forest home. Many of them collect fruit, resin, and vegetables in the woods to earn a living. Mongabay spoke with 20 people across two national parks. Most had not been told about the tiger plan. Six had never heard of it at all, including a local commune chief.
Some are scared. One woman named Che Preah earns up to 2,000 dollars a year gathering wild fruit. She says she would never go back into the forest if tigers were there. Others welcome the cats. For members of the Indigenous Chong people, tigers are spirit companions of the forest. One elder, Horn Kim Heng, said a forest without tigers is not really a forest.
What happens next
For now, no tigers have been moved. There is no firm date. The project may cost 43 million dollars over its first five years, and a main funder has pulled back. The plan is a soft release, holding the cats in a large pen until they adjust.
Big cats belong in the wild. We want to see tigers thrive again. But a reintroduction only works when the food is there, the poaching is stopped, the habitat is safe, and the people who share the land are part of the plan. Cambodia's tigers were lost once. The kindest thing we can do is make sure that does not happen twice.
Source: https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/bengal-tigers-in-cambodia-reintroduction-plan-raises-questions/
