There is widespread concern in Britain at the Ministry of Agriculture's decision to eliminate all badgers in sets where TB has been proved. Such sets are presently only known in a few small areas in the West Country – see Oryx, October 1975, page 114. The problem concerns bovine TB, which in Britain in the 1930s was estimated to cause at least 2500 human deaths a year (in addition to those caused by human TB), but which has now been almost eliminated with the pasteurisation of milk and the near elimination of the disease in cows by a ruthless slaughter policy. In this article the author explains why this drastic step is considered necessary and why many conservationists have regretfully agreed to support it.

In May 1974 IUCN set up the Threatened Plants Committee (TPC) of the Survival Service Commission, with Professor J. Heslop-Harrison, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, as Chairman, and Grenville Lucas, also of Kew, as Secretary. The need for a comprehensive survey had been highlighted by Dr Ronald Melville's pioneer work in compiling the Red Data Book for plants. The Committee's task is to prepare a world list of endangered and threatened (flowering) plant species so that action plans can be drawn up. The world's decision-makers must have the facts. The work is centred at Kew. Material is collected and action planned, either through regional groups (the European group has already produced a preliminary draft of rare, threatened and endangered plants), or through specialist groups (a world-wide palm group was the first to be appointed). A third approach is through institutions – most of the world's major botanic gardens sent representatives to a conference at Kew in September 1975. The following is a summary, with extracts, of Grenville Lucas's paper on the work of the TPC read at the IUCN meeting in Kinshasa.

The growing trade in rare butterflies threatens some relatively common species as well as rare ones, notably the conspicuous Rajah Brooke's birdwing. The author describes some of the traders’ activities and asks for information.

The author examines the age structure of captive orang-utans in zoos and institutions. He shows that, unless breeding success can be achieved with captive-born animals – which so far no zoo in the world has done – zoo numbers will continue to decline, with little hope of replacement from the wild now that the International Convention on Trade in Endangered Species is in operation. John Perry is Assistant Director for Conservation at the National Zoo in Washington, and a Vice-Chairman of the IUCN's Survival Service Commission.

A Trustee of the Indian World Wildlife Fund Appeal, the author has been closely connected with the conservation of the tiger. She describes the Sundarbans tiger reserve where some tigers are man-eaters. Mrs Wright was also involved in the incident in 1974, described in the following article, when a tiger that had killed a woman was translocated from an inhabited area to the reserve – the first time this had been done – in an attempt to save it.

In August 1974 a young male tiger moved into a populated area in the Sundarbans, the delta of the Ganges, and killed one woman and a number of livestock. Rather than destroy the animal the Forest Directorate decided to capture it, using immobilising drugs, and release it in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve. This was successfully done, but less than a week later it was found dead from wounds evidently inflicted by another tiger. The authors discuss the implications of the incident, the publicity it attracted, and the changes in public attitudes.

The black-footed ferret depends on prairie dogs for both shelter and food, living in their underground ‘towns’ and preying on them. But the prairie dogs, regarded as pests by the ranchers and farmers, have been subjected to intensive poisoning campaigns which successfully exterminated them over most of their range and heavily reduced their numbers in the rest. This has brought the ferrets to the verge of extinction. A conservation management programme is urgently needed but difficult to devise, because so little is known about these elusive, nocturnal and now very rare underground dwellers. The author believes that computer simulation models now offer a good study method, and suggests how this should be done.

One of the key papers at the Technical Meetings that accompanied the IUCN General Assembly in Zaïre was Dr Dasmann's showing how the emphasis in nature conservation has shifted. No longer can the ‘biosphere people’ – the people of the developed nations who draw on the resources of the whole world to maintain their life-style – simply urge developing countries to ‘protect’ wildlife and establish national parks while at the same time pressing them to cut back their population growth. One extra person in the USA will consume more in energy and materials than 20 extra people in Tanzania. What Dr Dasmann calls the ‘ecosystem people’—those who depend for all their resources on supplies within their local ecosystem – lived in balance with nature and, moreover, did not live impoverished lives, Today we can only solve our world problems by getting back to some better balance, ‘the old partnership with nature that existed without people being aware of it’. What we need, he suggests, is ‘conservation as if people mattered’ and ‘development as if nature mattered’. Nature conservation today demands new life-styles.

The proposal for a national park in Jebel Akhdar, in Oman, described in Oryx, November 1974, has been carried a stage further by a scientific survey made in April 1975 with the fullest support from the Oman Government. Originally the park was designed to protect the Arabian tahr Hemitragus jayakari, but so few survive in the area that the authors have recommended that, while the park plan should go forward, thus giving the survivors full protection, another reserve should be made the major conservation area for tahr.

In the course of his WWF survey for rhinos in Sumatra, the author also made a study of orang-utans. He came to the conclusion that the total number in Sumatra is not more than 3500–4500, despite higher figures that have been circulated, and that probably half of these – the animals living in forests outside the nature reserves – are severely threatened. Not only are they hunted and poached, but their habitat is being rapidly destroyed by big timber companies with concessions for clear-felling-15½ million cubic metres of timber were exported in 1973.

Calamian deer, which are found only in the Philippine Islands, have been so reduced in numbers over the last thirty years that unless hunting can be controlled, they are doomed to extinction. This is Ian Grimwood's conclusion after his 1975 survey which was aided by an Oryx 100% Fund grant. The deer have no enemy but man. There was no hunting during the Japanese occupation, and at the end of the Japanese war numbers were quite high. Since then increased hunting pressure has led to an accelerating decline, with more and more people hunting fewer and fewer deer. Today Ian Grimwood suggests the maximum number cannot be over 900 animals, and is probably much less, and extinction is certain unless action is taken. The following are extracts from the report: