- Cambodia’s plan to reintroduce tigers to the Cardamom Mountains, decades after their local extinction, has sparked debate over ecological readiness, governance, and community impact.
- The tigers are expected to be brought from India, prompting questions about their ability to adapt to different prey and landscapes, with experts warning that prey density in the Cardamom Mountains may simply be too low to support tigers in the long term.
- Snaring, targeted hunting, deforestation and infrastructure projects such as hydropower dams continue to threaten wildlife and tiger habitat in Cambodia.
- Residents of rural villages near the planned tiger release area say they have not been informed of plans to bring tigers into the forests that they rely on for their livelihoods.
Sat Born, 56, recalls freezing at the forest’s entrance when he first saw it. “Its head was this big,” he says, wide-eyed, spreading his hands to show the animal’s size.
Recollecting that eventful morning in 2001, Born, who now farms bananas and durians, retraces his steps from his home in Trapeang Chheu Trav village in the rainforests of the Cardamom Mountains in southwestern Cambodia. As he walks up a hill rising above the forest canopy, he points to a spot on the road. “It’s over here. When I saw the tiger, it was 9 a.m.,” he says. “I was really shocked … I couldn’t tell if the tiger was coming towards me.”
In 2007, just six years after this fleeting encounter, Cambodia’s last confirmed tiger sighting was logged by a camera trap. In the 1990s, the country was estimated to host hundreds of wild Indochinese tigers, but decades of poaching pressure took a heavy toll. In 2016, tigers (Panthera tigris) were formally declared extinct in Cambodia.
That may be set to change with the imminent translocation of a small population of Bengal tigers from India.
Although many reintroductions are success stories, this one raises some serious concerns. Why would Cambodia bring in a nonnative tiger? Have the people living in these areas been adequately consulted? Will these translocated tigers be able to adapt to this new habitat? Is there enough prey to sustain them, and if not, how will the government address predation when hungry cats feed on livestock? With logging and five new dams under construction, what is the fate of the tigers’ proposed habitat?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: If intensive poaching wiped out the country’s tigers — and the cat’s parts are still in high demand on the Asian black market — how will Cambodia prevent this from happening again?
An iconic species hunted to the brink
In the years that followed the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, as Cambodia plunged into two decades of conflict, it developed links to the regional wildlife trade, supplying tiger parts to international black markets, particularly in China, for use in traditional medicine or luxury products.
Tiger poaching ran rampant, with hunters using snares, guns, pit traps and even land mines to kill their prey.
“Many hunters trapped tigers,” Born says, recalling life in the village around 30 years ago. “There was no law enforcement.” In 2005, a Cambodian court sentenced one notorious tiger hunter, Yor Ngun, to seven years in prison after he confessed to killing more than 600 animals since the 1970s, including 19 tigers.
With tigers gone, poaching of other species continues apace. In 2023, the country lost another iconic cat, with the Indochinese leopard (Panthera pardus delacouri) declared functionally extinct in Cambodia.
“It’s ironic that we are sending one of the most protected animals in India — our flagship species — into a country with one of the worst records of wildlife protection, rampant snaring, and wildlife trade,” says Nirmal Ghosh, a trustee of Indian conservation group The Corbett Foundation.
Nonetheless, following Cambodia’s approval of a national Tiger Action Plan in 2016, and a 2022 agreement between India and Cambodia, India now intends to gift Cambodia a small founder population of Bengal tigers to be introduced into the forests of the Cardamom Mountains.
Like many things about this program, the exact details about the group of tigers remains unclear.
“The Action Plan has four or six tigers. It might be four females and one or two males. That’s the initial plan that we have put in,” says Jimmy Borah, deputy director at India-based conservation group Aaranyak and international consultant to Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment (MoE) for tiger reintroduction.
The scientist overseeing the project in India, K. Ramesh of the Wildlife Institute of India, however, estimates 11 will be translocated.
“If this fails, and a few tigers die, there will be a huge backlash in India,” says Ghosh, who warns that without adequately addressing the causes of tiger extinction in Cambodia, reintroducing the animal could be disastrous.
India’s tiger recovery efforts date back to 1973, when Project Tiger, a flagship conservation program, was launched. Since then, tiger numbers have more than doubled — from an estimated 1,800 to 3,600 as per the 2022 census.
However, despite increased protection and the rising numbers of tigers, habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict continue to threaten the species’ safety even within India.
Insufficient prey for the tigers
Carnivore biologist and tiger expert K. Ullas Karanth emphasizes that prey density ultimately determines tiger survival. An adult tiger kills roughly one deer- or cow-sized animal per week, while a breeding female may need even more. He compares this to living off interest from a fixed deposit: the prey population must be about 10 times the annual offtake to remain stable. To sustain one tiger that hunts 50 prey annually, around 500 large prey animals are needed. “Without that, dumping tigers into ‘empty’ forests simply does not work,” Karanth says, noting that prey depletion and hunting drove tiger losses in Cambodia in the 1990s — pressures he says still persist.
Tigers are planned for release into the 926,123-hectare (2.29 million-acre) Kravanh National Park, part of the protected forest network spanning the Cardamom Mountains. Although this landscape is among Cambodia’s most intact, some experts question whether it holds enough prey to sustain a viable tiger population.
Research published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice in 2020 found “the risk of insufficient prey to support a viable tiger population is too high for decision makers to endorse tiger reintroduction.” That study, conducted by the Wildlife Alliance, a nonprofit advancing the project, and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, estimated a less than 25% probability that the area could support 25 adult tigers. The study found an 80% probability the forest had enough prey to support a small population of five tigers — but small populations quickly become inbred and are unlikely to survive over the long term.
“Why introduce tigers into a habitat that is suboptimal in the first place?” Ghosh asks.
According to Phan Channa, deputy director of the Cambodian government office overseeing protected areas, the immediate focus is addressing the causes of tiger extinction and rebuilding prey before any translocation. This, Channa says, would be accomplished through stronger law enforcement, zero-snaring efforts, increased patrols, and potential prey restoration through breeding and translocations.
Channa did not explain how the timeline for prey restoration and law enforcement efforts might fit in with a plan that until recently called for tigers to be transferred to Cambodia by the end of 2025.
Prey composition is another concern. Thomas Gray of WWF’s Global Tiger Program and a co-author of the 2020 study, says wild pigs will likely dominate the tiger diet in the Cardamoms. While wild cattle such as gaur, deer such as sambar, and the goat-like serow occur locally, wild pigs make up most prey biomass. “The success of the reintroduction will largely be determined by wild pig density and abundance, and by how well tigers can adapt to a diet that is predominantly — though not exclusively — made up of them,” Gray says, adding that heavy reliance on wild pigs is common among tigers in parts of South Asia and even the Russian Far East.
Karanth counters that pigs can sustain tigers only if densities are high, adding he’s unaware of rigorous prey density studies confirming this in Cambodia.
Subspecies questions
Questions also surround the type of tigers planned for translocation.
The tigers that once roamed the Cardamom Mountains were historically recognized as the Indochinese subspecies (Panthera tigris corbetti), small populations of which still persist in Thailand and Myanmar. The tigers brought in from India, by contrast, come from the much more numerous Bengal subspecies (Panthera tigris tigris) population.
Whether these populations truly represent separate subspecies is the subject of much academic debate “due to inconsistent results from various methodologies,” according to the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. Some research, including a 2015 paper published in the journal Science Advances, determined that all tigers in mainland Asia belong to a single subspecies, P. t. tigris — including the Indian and Southeast Asian populations — while those found on the islands of Indonesia (including the Sumatran and the extinct Javan and Bali populations) comprise a second subspecies, P. t. sondaica. By contrast, other methodologies, including research published in 2018 in the journal Current Biology, find there to be six extant tiger subspecies, marking out the Bengal and Indochinese populations as distinct.
For some, including Sugoto Roy, co-chair of the IUCN’s Cat Specialist Group, the matter is settled: the Indochinese tiger is not recognized as a separate subspecies today. “So any tiger reintroduction to Cambodia would be from the mainland subspecies, which would be the same subspecies,” he says.
Uma Ramakrishnan, a molecular biologist and ecologist with India’s National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, says decisions such as reintroductions should prioritize genetic diversity, local adaptation, and mitigating inbreeding risk.
“In places like Cambodia where the local tiger population is declared extinct, introducing Bengal tigers may work out ecologically,” Ramakrishnan says, “However these are not the same as the original tigers in Cambodia.”
She points out another potential concern: “If in the future, this population gets connected to the native populations in Southeast Asia, there may be genetic mixing.”
Hunting, snaring and a dam as threats
In 2021, WWF halted its own plans to reintroduce tigers to Cambodia’s Eastern Plains after surveys revealed a rapid decline in ungulates. The drop in prey populations was largely blamed on snares, which are widely recognized as a primary driver of tiger declines across Southeast Asia.
Marcus Hardtke, a conservationist with decades of experience in Cambodia and a contributor to a 1999 Fauna & Flora International report on the Cardamoms, says hunting pressure “is still way too high” both in the project area and across the country. This includes not only snaring but also targeted hunting. “In the past, there were gangs in the Cardamoms specifically hunting large cats, using, among other methods, explosive traps,” he says.
Cambodia’s deforestation rates remain another major concern. In 2024 alone, the country lost more than 93,000 hectares (230,000 acres) of forest, about half of it inside protected areas.
In the Cardamom Mountains, logging operations and the construction of five new hydropower dams threaten potential tiger habitat. Just 7 kilometers (4 miles) from the tiger release station, construction for the 100-megawatt Veal Thmor Kambot hydropower dam has already opened up sections of previously untouched forest. Elsewhere inside Kravanh National Park, an irrigation dam that broke ground in early 2025 looks set to clear around 7,300 hectares (18,000 acres) of forest.
Channa, from the protected areas department, says the dam is not a big threat to wildlife. In his view, the bigger problems are hunting and disease. “If we can manage hunting and disease, we can manage the landscape,” he says, adding that reservoirs can even help stabilize water availability for wildlife.
He points to past experience to support this. Before a dam was built in one area in 2018, he and his team worried it would harm crocodile populations. “But after the dam became operational, the crocodiles came back,” he says. He also recalls increases in other wildlife; some bird species rarely recorded in the Cardamom landscape were later observed there.
However, tigers do not live in water, and many peer-reviewed studies of tropical dams have documented loss of biodiversity. In a 2021 study published in Nature, the authors found that hydropower development causes extensive direct habitat loss for land-dwelling species through reservoir flooding, with large-ranging apex predators like tigers and jaguars disproportionately impacted due to their low densities and high space requirements.
It’s also well-established that road construction and forest fragmentation associated with infrastructure development ease access for poachers and loggers.
Uncertainty on the ground
Although the 2022 agreement between India and Cambodia called for tigers to arrive from India by the end of 2025, at present none have been transferred, and there’s no clear timeline for release.
One issue is diminished funding from the main supporter, the Cambodia-based Wildlife Alliance, which did not respond to Mongabay’s questions by the time this story was published. The government is seeking additional funders, Channa says, for a project that is estimated to cost $43 million over its first five years.
“We hope we can start soon,” Channa says. A soft-release strategy is planned, with tigers held in a roughly 40-hectare (100-acre) enclosure until they’ve adapted to local conditions.
With the timeline uncertain, communities in the Cardamom Mountains are equally unsure what the tigers’ return would mean for their lives. Mongabay interviewed 20 people across two national parks in the Cardamom Mountains in 2025, revealing a range of perspectives on the prospect of tiger reintroduction. However, a recurring theme was a lack of awareness about the project.
Only two of those interviewed said authorities had informed them through official meetings. Others learned informally from rangers, Wildlife Alliance staff, neighbors, the news, or social media. Six, including a commune chief, had not heard of the project. “I think that they should consult us beforehand,” said Tep Mala, a guesthouse owner in Anlong Vak. “I request that they provide us with the clear boundaries and exact location of the tiger release because we walk in the jungle.”
A local official at the release station, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the release had not yet been promoted to communities. Ou Chen, commune chief of Tatai Krom, said he supports the project but called for clear communication so villagers know which areas to avoid.
Borah from India-based Aaranyak, says a stakeholder meeting is expected to happen soon, pending approval from the Ministry of Environment.
Critics says consultation should have preceded construction. Similar concerns about consultation have surfaced previously in initiatives involving the Wildlife Alliance and the environment ministry: In 2024, Human Rights Watch said the Wildlife Alliance hadn’t secured the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous Chong communities within the Southern Cardamoms REDD+ carbon credit project area, implemented with the environment ministry.
The Wildlife Alliance didn’t respond to queries from Mongabay, but has publicly rejected the claims in the past.
Channa says engagement is a road map priority after in-principle approval around 2020, but its implementation was delayed by staff shortages, funding constraints, and COVID-19 disruptions. He says outreach plans now include community meetings, school programs, stakeholder workshops, and a dedicated outreach unit.
Mongabay identified 17 villages inside Kravanh National Park that were within 50 km (30 mi) of a tiger release station built as part of the project. Several of these villages are just a few kilometers from the protected area’s core zone, where the tigers will be released. Mongabay could not obtain official data on the population of communities living inside Kravanh National Park.
Channa, however, says the nearest settlements are “maybe around 30 kilometers,” about 19 mi, from the release zone, though he adds he’s unsure of the exact distance. He says the risk of conflict is recognized and mitigation efforts are underway, including community outreach and disease-risk assessments in livestock and dogs, in line with IUCN translocation guidelines.
In Samroang village in the Areng Valley, Che Preah recounts a narrow escape from a tiger while tapping resin trees three decades ago. She says her feelings toward tigers haven’t changed. “Because we go to the jungle, we’re afraid of tigers biting us,” she says.
Preah earns $1,000-$2,000 a year collecting samrong fruits — income she fears losing. “If they release tigers, there’s no way I would go back to the forest … If we can’t go to the forest, what else can we do?”
Other residents interviewed by Mongabay, many dependent on the forest as a source of income for wild fruits, vegetables and resin, echo similar concerns about attacks. One Areng Valley resident says they worry about tigers preying on their buffalo.
Their fears have historical roots. Fauna & Flora International’s 1999 report described the Cardamoms as the “only Cambodia location reporting a significant man-eating tiger problem.” While no official figures exist, dozens of people were reportedly attacked and killed in the late 1990s.
Tigers are planned for release “deep in the core zone” of Kravanh National Park but without physical boundaries, making it unclear how Bengal tigers — with home ranges of 40-55 square kilometers (15-21 square miles) — will be monitored or contained, for their safety and for the safety of people living nearby.
Channa says such fears are natural. “You see the same thing in Europe now with wolves,” he says. He draws parallels with Siamese crocodile reintroductions, which also sparked anxiety. “Before the animals come back, people are very concerned. But when they see that coexistence is possible, the fear becomes less.” Mitigation plans with the Wildlife Alliance include insurance or compensation for livestock loss, early-warning systems, and community awareness programs.
Not everyone in the Areng Valley opposes the return of tigers. “I feel joyful to have tigers and other types of animals so that the next generation can know about them,” says 70-year-old Horn Kim Heng in Chrak Ruessy village.
![Sok Pheap climbs a tree to tap resin. Many people living in the Cardamom Mountains rely on the forest for collecting wild fruits, vegetables, and resin to sustain their livelihoods. Pheap isn’t worried about the prospect of tiger attacks if the reintroduction project goes ahead. “I think it’s a good [project] because we won't lose wild animals,” he said.](https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2026/06/01111636/Tigers-Cambodia_Mongabay_Andy-Ball-6-2.jpg)
![Sok Pheap climbs a tree to tap resin. Many people living in the Cardamom Mountains rely on the forest for collecting wild fruits, vegetables, and resin to sustain their livelihoods. Pheap isn’t worried about the prospect of tiger attacks if the reintroduction project goes ahead. “I think it’s a good [project] because we won't lose wild animals,” he said.](https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2026/06/01111641/Tigers-Cambodia_Mongabay_Andy-Ball-7.jpg)
For Kim Heng and her husband, Yong Tuk, members of the Indigenous Chong, tigers hold spiritual meaning. “Without tigers, without humans, we don’t call it a forest,” she says. Tigers are seen as companions of neak ta, ancestral spirits believed to inhabit trees, streams, rice fields and mountains.
Decades of conflict and tiger loss disrupted these traditions, but some, like Kim Heng, still hold them. “It’s OK to have tigers in the forest; they will not harm us,” she says. “The ancestral spirit never harms the people.”
Now that the project and the planning have gone ahead, it’s likely the first batch of tigers will reach Cambodia sooner rather than later. Whether these animals will truly be able to roam freely in the wild in the foreseeable future remains to be seen.
Helicopter translocation brings isolated banteng to safer grounds in Cambodia
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