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PETALING JAYA: Tall, athletic and one for the outdoors, it is no surprise that Tengku Hassanal Ibrahim Alam Shah is quite at home in the jungles of Pahang.

The 29-year-old heir apparent to the Pahang throne is at the forefront of efforts to keep the Malayan Tiger from extinction.

With only 150 of them left in the wild, there is no doubt that the prince has a herculean task ahead.

But his efforts have already drawn support from as far away as the Middle East and Europe. The Al-Sultan Abdullah Royal Tiger Reserve received a €1 million grant from the European Union last year, and in January this year, the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund committed a total of US$22 million over five years.

The tiger reserve is a 1,340-square-kilometre sanctuary set up by the Pahang royal family in 2023 to give the big cat a chance to survive.

Tengku Hassanal’s relationship with the big cat, as seen in his conservation efforts, is a far cry from the ties his great great-grandfather Sultan Ibrahim of Johor shared with the animal more than a century ago, according to a recent article on Go Malaysia, a website that focuses on issues of national interest.

In a 1902 edition of The Wide World Magazine that the Tengku Ampuan of Pahang Tunku Azizah Mahmood Iskandar stumbled upon recently was an account of Sultan Ibrahim and his love of the wild, albeit for a different reason.

In its article, Go Malaysia noted that both royals love the wild, but while the present-day prince is a conservationist, his forebear’s favourite sport was hunting.

As The Wide World Magazine stated, rather than shoot from a safe distance, Sultan Ibrahim, then 28, would “face the charging beats at close quarters, with a .5777 Express rifle and nerves of steel”.

The Malayan Tiger ruled the Malayan forests then. In the early 20th century, the Malayan Tiger was known to have ventured into and attacked villages. The threat they posed and their large numbers made them prime targets of hunters.

Times were also different then. The Malayan Tiger was not on the endangered species list yet. In fact, it was the ultimate adversary, according to the Go Malaysia article.

For aristocrats like Sultan Ibrahim, the forest was a playground.

But while he hunted tigers, his descendant now hunts poachers. Tengku Hassanal has men patrolling the same forests to look for and stop these plunderers in their tracks.

But he has also taken it a step further in his plan to restore the tiger’s habitat. The prince has a team to conduct research on the ecology of the forest, which has long been damaged by human activity.

Tengku Hassanal has also taken his cause to the international stage, fostering partnerships with organisations that share the same conservation objectives.

Partners in the forest

The human factor also accounts for a big part of Tengku Hassanal’s conservation efforts.

Rather than exclude the indigenous people from his plan, or even drive them out of their traditional lands, as has happened in places like India and Africa, he has chosen to make them partners.

Tengku Hassanal shares his great great grandfather’s respect and duty of care for the Orang Asli.

Sultan Ibrahim chose not to use them as trackers in his forays into the forests, as was the tradition then, so as not to put them at risk of being mauled and killed. Instead, he had his own trained men to do the task.

But on Tengku Hassanal’s stage, the Orang Asli plays a central role.

They are paid to be rangers, ecological monitors, and decision-making partners, roles they excel in given their generational knowledge of the forests. Their expertise has been essential for tiger protection.

Giving the environment a fair chance

We now know that hunting is not the only factor that poses an extinction risk to the Malayan Tiger.

Widespread deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, habitat fragmentation and the breakdown in the relationship between man and the wilderness are equally responsible.

That makes Tengku Hassanal’s work even more significant.

As Go Malaysia observes in its article, his application of current ecological thinking that combines mobilising transnational funding and embedding indigenous knowledge are helping to build a model where people and predators might coexist.