Plight of the tiger

Tigers in the wild face the real threat of extermination, with about 3,000 wild tigers left in the world.

Loss of habitat, combining with exploding human populations hungry for land, combining with industrial development, combining with poaching of tigers and prey, combining with weak and vague laws which are not enforced by apathetic governments, combining with the human desire to wear pelts of tigers or to hang a tiger head on a wall, combining with corruption among bureaucrats and high ranking authorities, combining with lack of political will to save the tiger, combining with desperate people living in poverty, combining with shortsighted business elites, combining with the availability of four wheel drive vehicles, guns, poisons and snares, combining with the ever-growing demand for superstitious tiger bone medicines, combining with climate change, have created a synergistic species-terminal crisis for tigers in the wild, where each factor clawing away at tigers combines together, like a killing juggernaut, against tigers in the wild.

With a world population of 7 billion people, predicted to increase to more than 9 billion in the near future, humans are paving over the world, with the tigers, and nature and wildlife, under the pavement. The Caspian Tiger, the Javan Tiger and the Balinese Tiger are already extinct.

With wild tigers annihilated, tigers will survive only in zoos, or as pets, or raised in breeding farms, like chickens, for the production of superstitious medicines.

Whether wild tigers survive depends entirely on the goodwill of humans. If humans make space for the tiger, and stop killing it, it will survive. If we don’t, it won’t.

I believe it is not too late. Against all odds, wild tigers still cling to life, and they are magnificent, resilient, flexible and persistent. This is a prodigious animal in its evolutionary prime. It can be saved.

The Plight of the Tiger is like an oil warning light coming on in your car. Hidden behind the Plight of the Tiger is the moral imperative to save this planet. If we destroy this planet Earth, we all go and everything goes.

Ecosystems are indispensable to the health of the planet. If we lose the animals we lose the ecosystems. Lose the ecosystems and the processes of life grind to a halt: Game over. So, we should turn off the Death Star that we are, stop killing our way across this planet, and heal this Earth.

The tiger is big, orange with black stripes, magnificent, fearsome; an umbrella, a keystone, a potential spotted owl, sufficiently charismatic to be used as a magnetic flagship species to save, and re-wild, Mother Earth.

If you are interested in helping to save the wild tiger, please send me an e-mail at: [email protected]. Also, here is a link, so you can sit at your computer and watch these big cats in action, as a Mother Tigress struggles to raise four cubs from tiny birth to adulthood. The photography is professional and amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfr8aFQpPoE

This is not a solicitation for money. I am looking for friends and allies, student and nonstudent, to form a Planning Committee dedicated to saving the wild tiger. Please join with me and help save this magnificent animal.