Sunday, November 21, 2010

A Last Ditch to Save Tigers

It's a lost case in my opinion since all most all the "demand" is coming from CHINA (I hope, I am wrong). If China want to show the world it's an emerging leader (leave alone super power), this is the chance - here:
"So countries and conservation organizations are urgently rallying to save the tiger, but their efforts are shadowed by the fact that the species has been “saved” before. Early in the 1970s, the tiger population in India fell to a similarly alarming level, below 2,000. President Indira Gandhi backed what may have been the most comprehensive single-species conservation plan of its time: Project Tiger, a system of dedicated national reserves supported by teams of rangers. Tiger numbers doubled over the next 15 years.

But after Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, the reserves fell victim to mismanagement, corruption, and neglect, and India’s rapidly growing economy sparked a massive expansion of infrastructure as cities ballooned, roads and highways were built, and hydropower and mining The level of assault on natural areas [in Asia] is unprecedented in human history.” projects were launched to boost power production. For tigers, this was bad news. John Seidensticker, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo who has been working on these issues for decades, describes development across Asia as devastating for wildlife, particularly for the large, connected landscapes necessary for big cats. “Roads are horrible ecological traps for tigers,” he said. “The level of assault on natural areas [in Asia] is unprecedented in human history. Tigers need big areas. That’s where the rub is.”

China’s economy took off as well, and millions of new consumers were able to buy wildlife products flooding the market. Having eaten its way through its own tigers, China turned to India, where poachers went after tigers in reserves. The scandal broke in 2005, with news reports saying that India’s wildlife officials had been cooking the books — it turned out that in one of India’s most renowned tiger reserves, Sariska in Rajasthan, poachers had extirpated the entire tiger population. Last year, news came that another reserve, Panna, had also lost its tigers."


Asking China to save Tigers is equivalent to closing all factory farming in US of A. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying.. there is always hope.

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