Robin's Nest from American Humane - Bringing Wildlife Back: Dr. Jhala’s Mission to Restore India’s Endangered Species

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

In this inspiring episode of Robin’s Nest, Dr. Robin Ganzert sits down with one of the world’s most influential wildlife scientists: Dr. Yadvendradev Jhala. For more than 30 years, Dr. Jhala has been at the forefront of India’s most significant conservation achievements, from leading the country’s historic tiger recovery to reintroducing cheetahs after 70 years of extinction. He shares the science, strategy and passion behind protecting endangered species, illustrating how data-driven conservation and global cooperation can restore entire ecosystems. Listeners will hear firsthand stories from the field, lessons from the world’s largest wildlife survey and his powerful vision for safeguarding the planet’s most vulnerable animals. It’s a masterclass in hope, leadership and what’s possible when passion combines with science.

Thanks for joining me in Robin's Nest, where compassion and conversation meet. My guest today is Dr. Jala, one of the world's leading wildlife scientist and a true hero for endangered species. From leading India's tiger recovery to bringing Cheetahs back after 70 years of extinction, his groundbreaking work has changed the future for wildlife across the globe. I can't wait for you to hear his incredible story. Welcome to Robin's Nest. Many of us feel a deep bond with animals from the pets we cherish at home to the endangered species in nature. Join us for lively and formative conversations where together we will build a more humane world. I'm so excited about this episode of Robin's Nest because I have one of my personal heroes on this episode. We're talking about

tigers and cheetahs and we're talking about bringing them back from extinction. This is the one gentleman who has a personal story to tell about how he's made a huge difference. Dr. Jala, welcome to this episode of Robin's Nest. Thank you so much, Robin. It's a big honor to be here. Oh, well, and also, congratulations to you for being a Kiesling Prize finalist. I think it's something which I didn't expect, and it's really wonderful to be here. Oh, we're thrilled to have you here at Fair Oaks Farms. Dr. Jala, can you please describe your love for animals and particularly your love for one species

that we all have such affection for? Well, it's been a childhood passion and as I recollected my first grade, my teacher asked us to write down what we wanted to be in the future and I said I wanted to be a zookeeper

and so the transition from first grade to where I am today was not difficult and it's a sort of a life, a dream come true and it's a life full of And with a mission and a purpose. What better purpose than to conserve species on this planet? Yes.

So it's very rewarding. And if I was given a chance, I'd do it all over again. That's wonderful. Well, talk to me about the one effort that you've done was tigers. Because tigers, by the way, we all know and love tigers. What's happened to tigers in your career? Right. So, well, India had done a lot for conservation of tigers.

We started off in the early 70s, the tiger conservation. Project Tiger was launched in 1973, and the Wildlife Protection Act in India was enacted in 1972. So we thought we'd achieved everything without accounting for our neighbors who were becoming rich, and poaching took the toll. So in India, we had extinguished the market for tigers because trophy hunting was not permitted by the law.

But when the tiger populations in Southeast Asia and China were exhausted, the poachers turned their eyes to India. And while we thought our tiger populations were doing really well, they were decimated with poaching. So it was not until we lost all our tigers in our tiger reserve near Delhi, Sarisca. Let this actual crisis come in too light. And the Prime Minister of India, at that point in time,

appointed a task force. And what year was that? This was in 2005. 2005, yes. So the official record of tigers in Sarisca was 19 tigers. when there were none. So officially, you know, so there was paper tigers across the country.

We believe we had 3,500 tigers. The Tiger Task Force then mandated me and my team to actually develop a scientific monitoring protocol for the entire country to assess tiger populations. And since then, every four years, my team and myself, we have been leading that project and counting tigers, basically,

with tigers take their own photographs by selfies through remote cameras. And I love a tiger selfie. And then we identify them using artificial intelligence and pattern recognition software from their stripes, sort of fingerprinting them. And this allows us to count them through statistical models. So we found that the official figure was 3,500 tigers in India, but we had only about 1,400 left. Unbelievable. So that was in 2006.

And since then, a lot of my research has contributed to changing policy of our own. how to conserve tigers, what are the size of tiger reserves, the core and the buffered strategy, and having people being moved out of tiger reserves so that you have high-density tigers and people not mixing and creating conflict. Yes. But the people had to be awarded and rewarded for moving out. You can't evict them, and we can't throw them out because they have their lives which have been ingrained with the forest.

So the government of India offered a compensation of $20,000 U.S. dollars, which is about 10 years of salary. Wow. For an individual to move out, voluntarily. And that created about 75,000 square kilometers of in-violate space for tigers. First of all, I just want to back up a minute and make sure that everyone who's in Robbins Nest today understands that the government led the way to create this incentive model to allow tigers to have their own habitat. This is incredible. And I don't think many of us have heard that story.

before. So you sharing it on Robin's Nest will allow so many of us to take lessons learned. But you were one of the ones to champion this and to advocate for this policy change and for the government to pay, what is? How many years worth of income? About 14 years of minimum wage income to move out for every adult in the family. So if you have three kids who are adults and your husband and wife, then you get four packages. And that's a lot of money for a tribe dweller to actually more of the forest. And that creates space for biodiversity

because tigers being the apex of the food chain keystone species. They can only exist if you have the entire trophic level intact. Yes. And so if tigers are there, then you have the ungulates and then you have the vegetation and then you have the forests and the soil.

Yes. So they act as a sort of an umbrella species for conservation. And that is the philosophy of tiger conservation. It is not a single species focused conservation but with the tigers, you protect the entire ecosystems and the ecosystem services which come out of it. So that has come out through, and then these policy changes came in,

and today we have close to about 3,700 tigers in India. You've more than doubled since your first census, your first survey. Absolutely. And that's huge congratulations. Thank you so much. That is so significant. And, you know, when we think about this, where, you know, countries can do the same.

They can follow this model, and you are, the government is incentivizing families to do the right thing and to allow the habitat to be there and you've doubled the population more than doubled. So my research has shown that tigers and people still need to coexist. So you have high-density tiger populations in tiger reserves, but we have 40% of our tigers outside of the tiger reserves, sharing space with people. 40% is a large number.

There's a lot of tigers. It's a lot of human-animal conflict opportunity. So when you live with people in large carnivores, there's bound. to be conflict. But wherever there's more prosperity and low poverty, coexistence is better off because it's poverty which drives conflict. Poor people go into the forest to extract forest resources and come in contact with tigers. If your livelihoods change, right, and you don't need forest and bio resources, then you don't come in contact with tigers and you can coexist peacefully. You need proper housing, proper toilet facilities. Yes. Your children don't need to,

you know, go into the forest to collect fuel wood. then the conflicts get minimized. So prosperity brings in coexistence. I was just in India, as we were speaking, just a few weeks ago, and I learned that there is such a rise in the middle class now in India. Absolutely. That prosperity is real, and it's happening now, and that again is allowing the animals to rebound in nature.

Absolutely, absolutely. So India is getting more and more prosperous, and coexistence is going to be the norm. Also, the attitude of the people matter. So if you, you can have coexistence, but we also lose about 50 individuals, 50 humans to tigers every year in the country. Oh, wow. Yes. But compared to snake bites, which is close to about 50,000.

Oh. Right. And car accidents about 150,000. Oh, my goodness. So in scale, comparison of scale, tiger deaths are minimal, but it is the tolerance of the people of India, which allows these large carnivores to actually coexist. The retaliation is not there. It is taken as a matter of fate. So tigers need space as much as people do.

And if you have that kind of attitude, only then can you have a large carnivore living amidst people. Yes. And as you said, that carnivore living amongst people's allowing as the apex creature so much to happen in that area of positive for biodiversity. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, well, of course, there is bound to be conflict when tigers are there. But it's the management of this conflict, which is the crux of the whole problem. Government pays compensation for loss of human lives and cattle, killed by tigers, lions, as well as leopards. So that helps ameliorate.

Of course, there is nothing to compensate for a loss of human life, but at least it takes the ease off, you know, to some extent. So when I was in India, I was warned to go into the bushes for the snakes. Absolutely. And I wasn't so worried about the tiger. I wasn't worried about a tiger conflict. but I was worried about those snakes. And you're saying 150,000 deaths? Do I hear that?

50,000 for snakes. 150,000 with cars. Car accidents, yes. Well, the snakes are quite something. So we'll save that for a whole other episode of those. I want to pivot to cheetahs. Talk to me, please, about your incredible work with cheetahs. So it's been a, you know, a fascination of a lifetime to bring back the cheetah into India.

The cheetah, as you know, is an Indian Sanskrit name. Yes. The species itself is named from the Indian word cheetah, which means the spotted one. But we unfortunately lost the cheetah after India became independent. So this is the first large carnivore which independent India lost. And I think it's when countries have the moral obligation and the social standing and the economic resources, then we should restore what humans have done, you know. Yes.

And cheetahs were lost in India because of human causes. loss of habitat, hunting, loss of prey. And now we have areas in India which are inviolate, there's enough prey, and the threats which cause their extinctions have been abated. So it was time to bring them back. And we did that after 75 years of their extinction, we brought the first animals from Namibia and then the second batch from South Africa. Yes.

So, well, they're doing reasonably well. This will be just three years. So only time will tell once they establish themselves successfully as part of the ecosystem. but we have had several litters born in India. That's a big deal. And we expected cheetahs to die from poachers, snares, and road accidents, and conflict with humans, but no animal has been lost due to any of these causes. So that is a big positive step.

Hopefully the cheetahs should establish themselves pretty soon as a part of a functional system, ecosystem. So I'd like to celebrate the cheetah because, you know, when you think about India, You think about the romanticism of the cheetah and the history of the cheetah is so integral to the culture. So I love that you're bringing them back. We have brought them back and we got the Prime Minister to release the first three animals. Oh, it's special. Yes. So you have the political will for the conservation.

Yes. And once you have the political will, you have the funding. So it looks good. You know, we hope that the cheetah establishes as a functional part of the ecosystem in India. What do you say to those who question on whether or not a cheetah is a cheetah is a cheetah. You're bringing back African cheetahs to India. Is there a subspecies issue there? Or does it look like it's going along beautifully?

No, there is definitely a subspecies issue. We had Asinonic Chubatus vanaticus in India, but that subspecies is not available anymore for a reintroduction. Yes. So you bring in the next best possible option. And the southern African cheetahs is the only population which can sustain an offtake of up to 100 animals without affecting the source population. The rest of the cheetahs are very few. And taking off about 100 animals for a reintroduction which you would probably require is not going to be possible in other populations or other subspecies.

Secondly, the southern African species subspecies, Jabattis, is the genetically most diverse. It's the ancestor of all subspecies of cheetahs. That's where the cheetahs actually originated from. So they're genetically diverse. And when you want to do a reintroduction, you want a large gene pool so that they adapt to the new environment. We had an issue of bringing in from the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere because they developed a winter fur when it was hot summer there.

And it'll take several years before they can adapt to the change in the photo period and then the hormonal changes. And once the next generation is born in India, I think they will adapt pretty well. So they are a different subspecies, but they are cheetahs, all right, and they hunt antelope and deer as much as they were doing earlier. So our critics were saying that they will not be able to take to the new cray base, but they took like just fish to water. And they started killing the first day they were released. So the cheetahs are doing pretty well, and I don't expect any problems in terms of their adaptation given time. The issue would be that we don't have the vast wilderness areas like Africa.

has. Yes. So this will be a managed metapopopulation. So it's not, we don't have hundreds and thousands of square kilometers of wilderness, but hundreds of square kilometers of wilderness. So cheetahs require a lot of space. So in any one population, we'll not have a long-term viable population unless we manage it as a metapopopopulation. And I suppose that's going to be the norm in many parts of the planet where large cano is going to be conserved. Absolutely. And I think we need to use the best of science and conservation know-how to make and rewild the species in this planet. And if we don't do that and we stick to the purest's view, I think we'll be fighting a losing battle at least conservation.

You've said something very interesting. I just want you to go back to repeat that because there are those quote-unquote ivory terror perspectives on conservation and then there's the practical boots on the ground. Let's make this work. So please go back into that a little bit more if you could dive. I feel into that. Yeah. So we have our critics who are saying that cheetahs will not actually take to the new prey base

and they would only need antelope to hunt. But the first day they were released into the bomas and had natural prey. They started killing chitled deer like they would have killed bushback or whatever else. Yes. That was not a problem. The problem does arise when we bring in animals from southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere. It takes them a while to adjust to the photo period. So they had a mismatch between their winter fur coming in in the middle of the summer.

in India. And of course, the monsoon they had never experienced before. So we lost a few animals due to that. But the next year onwards, I think we've not lost a single animal due to this problem. It's wonderful. So we have a different, we have a subspecies issue, no doubt. But we've done the best

we can to bring back an element which was lost in our ecosystem. And I believe we need to think out of the box. It is not that we need to stick to the purest point of view all the time, but be practical when we do rewilding. And in this case, the African Chita brought into India is the same species, a different subspecies, but it has the same ecological

traits to fit into the ecosystem, the element which we have lost. And I think today we, if you want to conserve large carnivores and anthropocene with so many people, 1.6 billion people in the mid-subcontinent, something novel has to be done. And we have the space, but it is going to be a managed metapopopulation, not a sustainable, single-viable population. And these concepts of conservation biology need to be used to the best of our ability to rewild the planet. Yes, yes. And there are benefits to rewilding absolutely outweigh any of those. I think the worst, yeah, the worst problem with conservation is us conservationists. So it's not it's not, it's not the politicians, nor the bureaucrats, nor the industrialists. You get support from all

these firms. But we critique each other to such an extent that we don't allow conservation to happen because of our purest views sometimes. And I think we need to introspect amongst ourselves and see how best do conservation in a particular scenario. It's a case-by-case basis based on the broad principles of conservation science. Yes. And not be stuck in our dogma to do. This is the only way to do it. There are multiple ways to do things. Absolutely. And all of them need to be explored today on this planet. What I love is your creativity and your passion. and importantly, stepping up early on as a champion for animals who had no voice. I loved a reference to paper tigers, the false number of tigers that were recorded decades ago,

and now you have real baselines, real improvements, and importantly, you have achieved systemic change with the government backing your efforts, and that is no small feat for those of us boots on the ground. It does take a practical approach to actually having a win for the animals. Thank you so much. As a Kiesling Prize finalist, what does this mean to you? You are a finalist. There are applications for all over the world, and you and several others were named a finalist

for this prestigious International Prize for Species Conservation. To be very frank, I didn't expect to be here today, and it's a big honor to be here. And I believe that till date my awards have been, you know, doubling of tiger numbers, the first chicks of the Great Indian Bustard being born in captivity for a conservation breeding program that I started, and the first black puck which was hunted by the cheetah on Indian soil.

Yes. But being recognized by colleagues, I think it definitely feels nice. Yes. And it's, I think, let's see, the best person wins, who always contributed the most. But it's a big honor to be sitting here with you and chatting. Oh, well, it's an honor to know you,

and I congratulate you in all your successes. And importantly, it serves as a great opportunity for us to explore what it takes for systemic change. He's a real-life example on a huge scale. And I encourage all of us listening to Robbins Nest to see how we can do our part in our own world and then expand it even broader. Thanks so much for being here, Dr.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Robbins Nest. Please like, subscribe, and follow. And thanks for all you do to build a more humane world.