In 2019, Malaysian conservationist Mark Rayan Darmaraj warned that the critically endangered Malayan tiger would be extinct by about this year if efforts to save it were not intensified.
But while the pandemic has offered this subspecies – one of five remaining in the world – a brief respite from poaching, they are still only clinging on. A national survey concluded in 2020 estimated that there remain fewer than 150 wild tigers in Malaysia’s forests, where 3,000 once roamed in the 1950s.
