“It is like a big safari park,” a Russian scientist working on Siberian tigers whispered conspiratorially to us after his first visit to Ranthambore National Park in 1996. From his point of view, the Russian far-east was “real” wilderness. To him, all of our National Parks and Tiger Reserves were little more than glorified zoos or safari parks. But is this necessarily the reality of conservation in a country with 1.4 billion people? A country that still boasts of having a remarkable conservation history, with robust populations of large carnivores such as tigers and leopards, the only populations of Asiatic lion and greater one-horned rhinoceros, and the largest population of Asian elephants.