Little, Brown £17.99 pp429

If you care no more about tigers than to smile at Tigger’s stutter, hiss at Shere Khan or be roused by Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”, be prepared have your thoughts overturned by Ruth Padel’s beautiful book.

Tigers prefer to attack their prey from the side or from behind, knocking it down and then killing either by biting its throat or displacing its vertebrae and throttling it. Padel, a poet not previously known for feline aggression, approaches their story sideways by describing the end of a five-year relationship. What, you might ask, does that have to do with tigers? Not much. But with the end of this affair, her emotions in tatters, she finds herself drawn towards the Zoological Society: “I was being pulled towards the great animal solitary. Tigers were about surviving, alone.”

Disney is the first initiation many of us have into the way of the wild world, and has done wonders recently for the sale of clown fish, but it does animals a disservice when it gives them human attributes. They don’t talk, they don’t think like us, they don’t emote for the cameras (although some of these tigers do pose). And, crucially, they are not subject to the same level of protection as the rest of us. Padel does something quite different to Disney; she tries to make sense of the human by looking at the animal. In the same way that, in The Snow Geese, William Fiennes charted his own returning joy as he followed the annual migration of the birds, so the broken-hearted poet goes looking for distraction, for reassurance, for her self. Tigers provide the initial inspiration and then become an obsession because, she realises, they are at the heart of what she calls “a worldwide war for the wild”.

Londoner Padel makes an unlikely tiger tracker. “I’m no field hunter,” she admits on the edge of Russia’s Pacific-bound Sikhote-Alin mountains. “I’m scared of snakes, ticks and bears.” But she doesn’t let fear hold her back as she travels to remote, demanding and invariably beautiful places in the Indian subcontinent, up into Nepal and Bhutan, on to China and northeast Russia, then down to southeast Asia. By the end, not even a scorpion in her bed can faze her. Everywhere she goes, tigers are under threat, their habitat reduced, their future bleak, their total global population now down to 5,000 at best. She walks, drives or rides tiger trails, talks to people working to ensure tigers’ survival, seeks to understand the threats and, above all, strives to see the bigger picture.

The result of her searching, unsurprisingly, is to realise that tigers face an unequal struggle. Threatened by population pressure, loggers and poachers, they have become victims of their own image. As icons of strength, their body parts are reduced to pills or powders and are taken by one fifth of the world’s population, who believe these concoctions can heal or protect them. (Fired by the same belief, people in the ancient Mediterranean wore lion skins, though of course in antiquity wildlife wasn’t threatened as it is today.) But Padel is not all gloom. Although the threats are formidable and have huge political muscle behind them, the same goes for the moves to save tigers. Above all, she delivers one compelling reason why we must ensure these creatures live on: like us, they are at the top of their food chain. When they cannot survive, the world — our world — is in ruins.

The book is long (perhaps a little too long in places) but it never palls. Padel has the linguistic gifts and imaginative drive to keep the reader caring about her passion and concern, and she explains the metaphysical appeal of the tiger as well as its physical, scientific and political significance. Further, she shares her inner journey with us along with the external. By the end of her travels, some of the tiger’s love of freedom has rubbed off on her and the woman broken by the end of a relationship is standing in a jeep, hair flying in the wind, feeling “like a child”.

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