Bali Tiger - Documentation, Hunting and Tiger Culture in Bali

Documentation, Hunting and Tiger Culture in Bali

In Balinese culture, the tiger had a special place in folk tales and traditional arts, like in the Kamasan paintings of Klungkung kingdom. However, they were perceived as a destructive force and culling efforts were encouraged until extinction.

Very few reliable accounts of encounters and even fewer visual documentations remain. One of the most complete records was left by the Hungarian baron Oszkár Vojnich, who trapped, hunted and took photos of a Balinese tiger. On November 3, 1911, he shot dead an adult specimen in the northwest region, between Gunung Gondol and Banyupoh River, documenting it in his book "In The East Indian Archipelago" (Budapest 1913).

According to the same book, the preferred method of hunting tigers in the island was catching them with a large, heavy steel foot trap hidden under bait (goat or muntjak), and then killing them with a firearm at close range.

A final blow to the island's already low tiger population came during the Dutch colonial period, when shikari hunting trips were conducted by European sportsmen coming from Java, armed with high-powered rifles and a romantic but disastrous Victorian hunting mentality. Surabayan gunmaker E. Munaut is confirmed to have killed over 20 Bali tigers in only a few years.

The last confirmed tiger sighting was of an adult female, killed on Sep. 27, 1937, at Sumbar Kima, in western Bali. Since then, claims of sighting have been made, but without proof, mostly by forestry officers, in 1952, 1970 and 1972. Any remaining tigers likely were pushed to the western side of the island, mostly into area that is now West Bali National Park, established in 1947.

The Balinese tiger was never captured alive on film or motion picture, or displayed in a public zoo, but a few skulls, skins and bones are preserved in museums. The British Museum in London has the largest collection, with two skins and three skulls; others include Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Naturkunde Museum in Stuttgart, Naturalis museum in Leiden and Zoological Museum of Bogor, Indonesia, which owns the remnants of the last known Balinese tiger. In 1997, a skull emerged from the old collection of Hungarian Natural History Museum and was scientifically studied and properly documented.

Unlike stag hunting, which they mastered, very few, if any, Balinese embraced tiger hunting before the arrival of Europeans to the island, because tigers were seen as evil, dangerous creatures. Still, tigers had a well-defined position in folkloric beliefs and magic. For example, the Balinese considered the ground powder of tiger whiskers to be a potent and undetectable poison for one's foe. According to the same book mentioning this, Miguel Covarrubias's "Island Of The Gods", 1937, when a Balinese baby was born, he was given a protective amulet necklace with black coral and "a tiger's tooth or a piece of tiger bone".

Like in other Asian nations, Balinese people are fond of wearing tiger parts as jewelry for status or spiritual reasons, like power and protection. Necklaces of teeth and claws or male rings cabochoned with polished tiger tooth ivory still exist in everyday use. Since tigers have disappeared on both Bali and neighboring Java, old parts have been recycled, or leopard and sun bear body parts have been used, instead. One of the traditional Balinese dances, the Barong, still preserves in one of its four forms, a type called the Tiger Barong (Barong Macan).