Deep in the forests of Peninsular Malaysia, another large mammal is disappearing with far less recognition.
The Seladang, also known as the Malayan Gaur, is the biggest species of wild cattle in the world that roam Malaysia’s forests. A mature bull can weigh up to one tonne and be more than six feet tall. Despite its majestic size, the seladang is easily overlooked, compared to more well-known mammals such as the tiger or the orangutan. As Datuk Dr John Payne, the Chief Executive Director of Bringing Back Our Rare Animals (BORA), observed, part of the issue might be that people often see it as a cattle rather than a wild species in its own right.
Unfortunately, the seladang’s size does not protect it. More than a century ago, this species roamed freely across Peninsular Malaysia—a range that has now shrunk dramatically. Today, it is estimated there may be fewer than 200 seladang left in the wild, with only a small number of breeding herds remaining. The decline is important because a species can’t recover from a declining range with an even smaller number of animals able to breed. More troubling is that their numbers are not necessarily recovering even in protected forests.
Which raises a deceptively simple question:
The answer, as Dr John Payne and Dr Ahmad Zafir discussed extensively in the recent episode of BFM: Earth Matters, may come down to something surprisingly basic.
Food.
Seladang are grazers, and grass makes up a large part of their diet, along with woody vegetation, shrubs, and herbs. Almost a century ago, this vegetation could be found along the riverbanks, which have now long since transformed into villages, towns, or oil palm plantations. Another source of the grass has long since vanished too—the wild herb and soft grasses that used to grow on abandoned swidden farms before the forest reclaimed them, had been replaced with permanent crops after the shifting cultivation practice was forgotten. The once ephemeral grassland disappeared with it.
The construction of dams also compounded the loss. Dr Ahmad Zafir recalled talking to elderly villagers near Sungai Perak, who recounted watching herds of almost 30 seladang graze the riverbanks before the Temenggor hydroelectric dam flooded the lowland area that produced the grass Seladang needs.
What remains today is a very different landscape.
Most of Malaysia's remaining forests are now in the hills. And while the hill forests may still provide woody vegetation for the seladang to graze on, they do not provide the grassland that breeding herds need. That distinction matters a lot.
Which brings us back to the earlier point that even within protected forests, seladang numbers are not recovering; in fact, they continue to dwindle. The reason, as Dr John Payne and Dr Ahmad Zafir emphasised, was that ‘protection’ alone was never what the species needed.
Presence Isn’t the Same as Progress
For years, conservationists have relied on data from camera traps, among other methods, to determine whether a given species is present in a given area. In this case, it provides some sense of security: we have pictures of seladang turning up across Peninsular Malaysia, and it might suggest that the population is more resilient than it actually is.
However, most of the camera-trap photos showed either solitary bulls or very small herds of a few individuals, perhaps a female and a young calf. Solitary bulls are young males who wander away from their herd around age five or are eventually pushed out to start looking for their own mates. Those are very different from a large herd, usually consisting of eight or ten seladang, with fertile females and calves. They are not evidence of a breeding population.
Across all the sites in the Royal Belum landscape where seladang were recorded, only approximately two sites showed females with calves.
Dr John Payne estimated that there are probably fewer than ten breeding herds left across the country, and even those are confined to marginal hill forest, which, as we have been made aware, is not a suitable breeding habitat for seladang.
In other words, finding a seladang doesn’t necessarily mean their population is recovering. A solitary bull can go for tens, maybe hundreds of kilometres with little food, but that is not the case with breeding herds. They need a lot of grass, and there isn’t enough space to provide that for them.
However, grass alone isn’t the whole story either.
The Missing Minerals
In the interview, Dr John Payne and Dr Ahmad Zafir discussed, in detail, the different types of minerals that seladang needs. The growing calves, for example, need calcium and phosphorus, as well as trace elements like copper and selenium, which come from natural salt licks such as jenut or sira. But many of those minerals now sit beneath villages and oil palm and rubber estates. Dr John Payne argued that replacing those much-needed minerals with manufactured ones sold for domestic animals isn’t merely a bonus intervention but a necessity for seladang’s survival.
There’s also a much quieter debate buried underneath, in which most of the grass seladang graze on today, including a common species called Paspalum conjugatum, which we call rumput kerbau, is not native to Malaysia. Dr John Payne dismissed the concern about it being a non-native species, citing that the grass is already a seladang favourite based on a historical record from Syers’ era.
He also noted that in Malaysia’s humid tropical climate, any cleared grassland will eventually be reclaimed by the forest again. So the real issue here is not which grass species we need to plant; it’s the reluctance of the forestry bureaucracy to plant any grass in forest reserves at all.
A Policy Problem, Not Just an Ecological One
That reluctance comes from the way we have always associated forests with trees. So when an area of the forest is degraded, the default action is to replant more trees and disregard everything else, even though trees are not what seladang need.
Under the current forest management categories, planted grassland is classified as “non-forest”, which both scientists argued has no ecological justification. Payne noted that the amount needed is minuscule; if even 0.01% of the forest reserve is allotted for grassland, that would be enough to sustain the country’s remaining seladang and even deer.
In July 2024, the seladang was recognised as a species of national importance and was apparently promised a conservation management plan. After two years, both Dr John Payne and Dr Ahmad Zafir mentioned they have yet to see it.
When they were asked what they’d want in that plan, both researchers agreed on the same starting point—to map every remaining breeding herd in the country, which is now confined to a band stretching from Pahang to Perak. They added that it is crucial to identify where grass and mineral licks can be established on a site-by-site basis, and that this needs to be backed by patrolling and enforcement.
The scientists then pointed out an underused resource hiding in plain sight: the captive seladang. There are around 20 wild cattle in Jenderak Selatan, Pahang, with more in Sungkai and Kelantan. It is said that they all descended from six individuals, two females and four males, captured in the 1980s.
Unlike the now-extinct wild Sumatran rhino population, which had only a few captive animals to work with, the seladang population offers potential for breeding. This includes the potential to use domestic cattle as surrogates to raise calves until their eventual release. Dr Ahmad Zafir then mentioned that past release attempts produced mixed results. He noted that animals accustomed to being fed usually failed to find food on their own in the wild, underscoring that any release strategy is as good as the grass waiting for the seladang.
Before It’s Too Late
At the end of the conversation, both of them emphasized again and again, not to wait until it’s too late.
Saving the seladang may also force us to rethink what conservation looks like. Sometimes, protecting a forest means keeping something out. Sometimes, it means putting something back in.
And for the seladang, it may mean something remarkably simple, and that something might just be a patch of grass.
