Tigers face extinction in a decade
No parking on the double lions! ... as experts warn about their big cat cousins
TIGERS could be extinct within a decade, campaigners warned yesterday.
Numbers have fallen by 96 per cent in the past 100 years – from around 100,000 across Asia to 4,000, the British conservation charity Born Free said.
‘With statistics as shocking as these, we could face a world without wild tigers in less than a decade,’ it added.
Launching an international plea to save the species, Born Free chief Howard Jones said: ‘ Tigers need our intervention more than ever due to countless threats including human-wildlife conflict, poaching for their body parts for traditional “medicine” and habitat loss due to deforestation and chaotic or illconsidered rural development.
‘It’s unimaginable to think of a world without tigers but unless we act now, the consequences could be dire.’
Around 60 per cent of the world’s tigers live in India and while poaching there has been radically reduced, with 50 illegal hunters jailed in a crackdown, they face a range of threats from people.
As areas of forest in India
‘Consequences could be dire’
are threatened by development, tigers are more likely to come into contact with human settlements, creating the risk of conflict.
Mr Jones said: ‘We urgently need support for our Living with Tigers initiative so we can encourage human-wildlife co-existence through education and by involving the local community in initiatives to improve their livelihoods.’
The charity wants to train ‘tiger ambassador’ teams and education units to visit villages and teach people about human and wildlife co-existence. Born Free is working with the Satpuda Foundation in the Satpuda forests of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states.
There are initiatives to help villages create biogas – fuel from plants and animal waste – to avert the need for people to gather firewood in forests where tigers roam. Measures such as building toilets will also help by removing the need for villagers to enter the forest to relieve themselves.
Mr Jones added: ‘The key to co-existence is tolerance, education and community engagement. The good news is Living with Tigers is making progress. In the past 10 years, tiger numbers have increased to a population of 500 across the Satpuda landscape.’
In the past 80 years, three of the last nine sub- species of tigers have become extinct: the Bali tiger in the 1930s, the Caspian tiger in the 1970s and the Javan tiger in the 1980s.