PETALING JAYA: Malaysia’s roads are not safe enough for animals to cross and more infrastructure is needed to help them do so, green groups said.
Their warnings came after a tiger was killed on a highway yesterday.
More than 100 animals were hit over the past year.
“If you have a road dissecting a (tiger’s) home range, it’s inevitable they will cross to the other side,” said Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia director Dr Melvin Gumal.
He said special passages built under or over roads would give animals a chance to cross them without being hit by traffic.
“There (passages) are not enough. Tapirs are killed, elephants knocked,” he said, adding that signs asking people to slow down were not enough.
At about midnight yesterday, a Malayan tiger was hit by a car on the East Coast Expressway Phase 2 (LPT2).
Bernama reported that environmental factors such as wild and domestic animals accounted for 113 accident cases on the LPT2 from Feb 1 to Nov last year.
The Department of Wildlife and National Parks later confirmed that the tiger was pregnant with two foetuses aged about two months.
WWF-Malaysia executive director Datuk Dr Dionysius Sharma said there have been passages made, though the move to build them has been “slow”.
“We’re finding more increases (of wildlife accidents) on the roads. We need to work faster,” he said.
Malaysian Nature Society president Henry Goh said the LPT2 cut through primary forests in the peninsula.
The highway has been fully operational since Jan 31, 2015.
The Star previously reported that 1,924 wild animals were killed on roads in Malaysia from June 2006 to June 2014.
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