A herd of banteng including several bulls and females. They are the few left in the wild. — Photo courtesy of Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC)/ Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD)
IN 2019, Sabah declared the Sumatran rhinoceros extinct. Now, a battle is on to stop the Bornean banteng from going the same way. With only about 500 or less animals left in the wild, the banteng – locally known as tembadau or wild cattle – is staring at extinction in Sabah.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has already classified it as “critically endangered” on its Red List of Threatened Species.
Veteran wildlife conservationist Datuk Dr John Payne sees hope that the wild buffalo population could be saved from the brink of extinction with the right measures.
By Dr JOHN PAYNE
Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA) chief executive officer
THE majority of wildlife conservation work in recent decades has been based on cognitive biases and therefore neither understands the nature of the problem to be addressed for any particular species or circumstance, nor puts in place programmes to manage the situation.
A popular slogan is that habitat loss and poaching are the main reasons behind why species are endangered.
Let us look at the case of the Bornean banteng, locally known as tembadau, kalasiu or lisang in Sabah.
It is true that habitat loss has contributed to a massive decline in numbers and distribution. But the loss in this case is of freshly regenerating grasslands and shrubs and supplementary minerals.
Banteng belong to the cattle family, meaning that a large part of their diet has to be grass. There is no grass in the closed canopy rainforest.
Prior to around 15,000 years ago, most of what is now the South China Sea was exposed land, covered in mixed forest and savannah vegetation.
After that, humans throughout South-East Asia cleared forest by burning it during dry periods.
This culminated in land clearing for agriculture, whereby rice was grown for one or two seasons, and the farms then abandoned, to be colonised naturally by grass and woody bushes.
Two bull bantengs seen along a river in one of the forest reserves in Sabah.
Grass was also formerly naturally common along river banks. Now, all riverbanks in the lowlands are occupied by humans. And the old slash-and-burn agriculture system has essentially been wiped out in favour of settlement and cash crops.
Banteng cannot survive in Sabah’s natural forests alone. They need pastures. They also need supplementary minerals that are lacking in a purely plant diet. Thus, the first and most essential step to recover banteng herds is to mimic the habitat that produces the bulk of their nutrition.
This is what Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA) has been doing in Tabin Wildlife Reserve since 2021. There, the last remaining herd was producing four calves per year in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
In 2021, we put in a five hectare managed grassland along with mineral blocks. There were six calves born in 2022 and eight in 2023.
We have thousands of camera trap video clips and images from 12 cameras set in that area over five years.
Hundreds of those images show banteng eating grass or licking minerals. Not a single image shows them eating woody vegetation, even though woody vegetation is plentiful in the field of view of the cameras.
Over the period 2019 to 2024, there was one definite case of poaching of banteng on the west side of Tabin Wildlife Reserve in 2020 and one suspected case in 2024. In both cases, the banteng had been shot on private land when they went out to feed on grass.
There are two fashions that have become very popular after the year 2000. One is to plant trees. That is fine if the purpose of planting is clear, and the locations are well-chosen and the plantings maintained to large size.
But for banteng, the need is to plant grass. It is also important to note that grass must grow productively on fertile soil.
In Tabin, we are not allowed to cut trees, so we planted grass on an old road – which is made of compacted clay on stones, meaning grass growth rate is poor.
We planted the same grass on flat alluvial soil nearby, and that grass puts on 80 tonnes of fresh biomass per hectare per year.
In the absence of sufficient nutrition, it is not surprising that banteng numbers are not recovering.
We can see that vividly in camera trap images, where individual banteng are seasonally very thin. By tracking individual banteng over the years on the images, we also see that calves grow much more slowly than domestic cattle.
All this is proof that the limiting factor for Bornean banteng recovery is their nutrition.
The other fashion is to insist that poaching is the main cause of wildlife decline, and to field teams of men to patrol forest areas as a means to reduce poaching.
To believe that stopping poaching will in itself lead to wildlife recovery is as ludicrous as to believe that a food supply chain problem can be solved by arresting shop-lifters.
If the problem is one of food production and distribution, those are the issues that need to be addressed.
Unless and until these sorts of cognitive biases are realised and rectified, then Bornean banteng will go extinct. Several banteng-related programmes - such as monitoring them but doing nothing to boost reproduction, patrols, making habitat ‘corridors’, public awareness and investigating risk of hybridisation with cattle - are actually using precious resources that would be better spent on creating managed banteng feeding sites.
The Sabah Forestry Department really needs to allow development and maintenance of managed pastures inside Forest Reserves, for banteng, deer and elephants alike.
Another point to note is that breeding banteng in captivity will be relatively easy and cheap.
They are wild cattle, and much is known about husbandry and breeding of cattle. Establishment of a Bornean banteng captive breeding herd should be set as the next priority after the creation of more pastures for wild herds.
Finally, no one can attempt to do everything.
The wildlife authority would do well to prioritise a few species and issues, and to make clear policies on those issues.
Too much time and resources are spent on catching people who have killed or are keeping wildlife in cages, where those species are common and in no need of special protection.
The Bornean banteng is not only a priority species, but a species where simple management interventions will be successful.
