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201222May20:29

Tiger recov­ery: urgent action still needed to fight poach­ing protection

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 22 May 2012 | mod­i­fied 04 Decem­ber 2012
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A year-​and-​a-​half after a land­mark sum­mit that pledged to dou­ble the world’s num­ber of tigers by 2022, and still 65 per­cent of tiger reserves lack min­i­mum stan­dards of pro­tec­tion for the world’s largest cat, accord­ing to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Report­ing at the first meet­ing of all 13 tiger-​range coun­tries since the 2010 sum­mit, WWF said that 41 tiger reserves of 63 did not have enough boots on the ground to com­bat tiger poaching.

Steady progress is being made towards meet­ing the goal of dou­bling wild tiger num­bers, but tiger range gov­ern­ments must urgently and seri­ously step up action to elim­i­nate poach­ing if they do not want their invest­ments to go to waste
Mike Baltzer, head of WWF’s Tigers Alive Initiative »

Tigers are killed for their body parts, which are used in tra­di­tional Chi­nese med­i­cine. Although the big cats are also threat­ened by habi­tat loss, prey deple­tion, and trap­ping, experts say the biggest bar­rier to meet­ing the goal of dou­bling wild tiger pop­u­la­tions is per­va­sive poaching.

TRAF­FIC, an NGO devoted to com­bat­ing the ille­gal wildlife trade, also reported that high tiger trad­ing places included Kath­mandu, Nepal; Hanoi, Viet­nam; and the bor­der between Rus­sia and China. On the pos­i­tive side, seizures of ille­gal tiger parts con­tin­ued to be high.

“This gath­er­ing of tiger range states shows that the momen­tum to save tigers is indeed build­ing, but the pres­sure on the species con­tin­ues,” Ravi Singh, head of WWF-​India, said. India has the world’s largest pop­u­la­tion of wild tigers. “Coor­di­nated anti-​poaching mea­sures across tiger range states are called for. These need to be scaled up and imple­mented urgently to achieve zero poaching.”

ARKive photo - Sumatran tiger in deep jungle

The tiger is listed as Endan­gered by the IUCN Red List. Around 3,000 tigers are believed to sur­vive in the wild today — less than the num­ber held in cap­tiv­ity in the U.S. There are six sur­viv­ing sub­species of tiger today, two of which — the Suma­tran tiger (Pan­thera tigris suma­trae) and the South China tiger (Pan­thera tigris amoyen­sis) — are listed as Crit­i­cally Endan­gered; the South China tiger is believed to be extinct in the wild, but there are plans to rein­tro­duce the sub­species. The Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury saw the extinc­tion of three tiger sub­species: the Javan tiger (Pan­thera tigris sondaica), the Caspian tiger (Pan­thera tigris vir­gata), and the Bali tiger (Pan­thera tigris suma­trae).

The above news item is reprinted from mate­r­ial avail­able at Mongabay. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and lenght.

(Source: Mongabay, 21.05.2012)

UN Biodiversity decade
WWF Stop Wildlife Crime
Fight for Flight campaign
End Ivory-funded Terrorism
Support Rewilding Europe
NASA State of Flux

Goal: 7000 tigers in the wild

Tiger range countries map

Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

about zoos and their mis­sion regard­ing breed­ing endan­gered species, nature con­ser­va­tion, bio­di­ver­sity and edu­ca­tion, which of course relates to the evo­lu­tion of species.
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