It is something I have never been able to get my head around: while we are quick to proudly point out to the world that we have (as yet) not lost a single species of mega-fauna since Independence, (though, the Asiatic cheetah went extinct that very year.), we never seem to learn that perhaps it’s better not to wait until there’s just a handful of survivors left before running helter-skelter to save them in what I like to call Mayday conservation. Take the Royal Bengal Tiger: Down from 40,000 at the turn of the century to around 3,000 in the seventies, before Project Tiger was launched in 1973, and several Tiger Reserves were notified with the intention of protecting tiger habitats. Then we shut our eyes again until a census revealed that suddenly there were just over 1,400 tigers left between 2002 and 2008. Poaching for tiger skins and bones (which the Chinese believe will make them have even more babies) went on wholesale.…