Word: amur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ironically, what makes the tiger so vulnerable to humans is its unshakable grip on the human imagination. For millenniums, tigers have prowled the minds of mankind as surely as they have trod the steppes and forests of Asia. On the banks of the Amur River in Russia, archaeologists discovered 6,000-year-old depictions of tigers carved by the Goldis people, who revered the tiger as an ancestor and as god of the wild regions. In Hindu mythology the goddess Durga rides the tiger. And Chang Tao-ling, a patriarch of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, also mounts...
...situation is in India, it is far worse in eastern Russia's taiga. The Amur tiger that inhabits this 800-mile-long stretch of evergreen forest nearly disappeared once before -- during the 1930s, when communist big shots would bag eight or 10 of the cats during a single hunt. But the state exercised iron control over the region, and when it decided to protect the tigers, their population recovered from roughly 30 to as many as 400 during the mid-1980s. Unfortunately for the Amur, tiger-bone prices began surging in the early 1990s, just when the fall...
...left the local wildlife departments broke and officials susceptible to bribes. Amid this collapse of enforcement, "the poacher owns the taiga," says Steven Galster, who monitors conservation efforts from Vladivostok for Britain's Tiger Trust. Not content with staking out areas frequented by the cats, some hunters stalk the Amur tiger on horseback with the help of dogs...
...killed, and the poaching continues unabated this year. A new study of tiger-population dynamics led by biologist John Kenney of the University of Minnesota suggests that even moderate poaching makes extinction a virtual certainty once a tiger census drops below 120. Unless the Russian government controls hunting, the Amur tiger will cross that threshold within two or three years...
Oddly, the Siberian tiger -- a critically endangered subspecies -- may have the best chance of survival, but only if poaching is controlled. "The Amur tiger has 800 miles of unbroken habitat to move through," says Howard Quigley, who is co-director of the Siberian Tiger Project, a Russian-American conservation effort, "but unless poaching is stopped, there will be no tigers to move through it." The Tiger Trust and the World Wildlife Fund offered vehicles, training and supplemental pay for Russian wildlife rangers, but the killing of tigers continued as those proposals languished for months on the desks of bureaucrats...