Word: habitats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whatever the outcome, it may be too late to save the tigers. They once rambled across most of Asia, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south to Turkey in the west. Now they are confined to small, shrinking pockets of their forest habitat. The Caspian subspecies became extinct more than a decade ago. So did the Balinese and Javan cats. The survivors are impossible to count with any precision, but fewer than 650 Sumatran tigers remain and maybe 200 of Siberia's Amur, the world's largest cat. China has a few dozen left, and these isolated...
...conservation community so desperately wanted to believe in the success story that it ignored signs that all was not well. No government program could stop encroachment on tiger habitat as human numbers kept increasing; India alone has grown by 300 million people since the last tiger crisis. Moreover, many of the animals counted in Indian censuses turned out to exist only in the imaginations of bureaucrats who wanted to show their bosses that they were doing a good job of saving the tiger. Most significant, the tiger's defenders failed to pay enough attention to the growing market...
...remedy is not that simple. Even if international pressure eliminated poaching, the tiger would still be in trouble. Its habitat is shrinking, and its food supply is dwindling as the territory claimed by humans inexorably expands. Can people be comfortable living in close proximity to hungry predators who on occasion eat humans? Says Geoffrey Ward, author of The Tiger- Wallahs: "Poaching is murder, but crowding is slow strangulation...
Given the pressures on habitat, some zoologists maintain that captive breeding of tigers and their eventual reintroduction into the wild should be pursued as a way to keep the species alive. Schaller and many other ; conservationists dismiss this approach as both inefficient and unrealistic. Tigers learn from their mothers subtle details about hunting that would be difficult for human mentors to teach. And once tigers have disappeared from an area, Schaller notes, it becomes extremely difficult to convince villagers that they should welcome the animals back. "It would cost millions to breed and reintroduce tigers," says the biologist. "If Asian...
...Sammy Glick desperation. For participants, it's a chance to make a year's worth of contacts in a few sleep- deprived nights. For outsiders, it's a zoological treasure trove, a place where all the major species of Hollywood schmoozemeister can be observed in an only slightly unnatural habitat...