Word: tigers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...knows how many tigers are left, but today Primorski province is estimated to have between 180 and 200, down from 350 in 1990. Vasili Solkin, the head of the Russian environmental group Zov Taigi, which means Roar of the Taiga, estimates that in 1993 alone, 75 to 80 tigers were killed, representing more than one-quarter of the remaining population. When traditional East Asian apothecaries ran out of sources for tiger skin and bones, which are used as medicine, among the places to which they turned for new supplies was Siberia. At the same time enforcement efforts collapsed as budgets...
Nevertheless, market chaos and international attention appear to have alleviated the crisis somewhat. In 1994 poaching began to drop dramatically. Solkin says that last year between 25 and 30 tigers were killed, about the level of poaching during the Soviet period. He argues that as many as 40% of the tigers killed in the early 1990s were never sold because of the anarchic marketplace and fear of being caught, and notes that drug dealers who dabbled in the illegal wildlife trade have backed off because trouble over a tiger skin could jeopardize an established channel for moving drugs...
...tiger-poaching crisis also showed the degree to which Russians can control an environmental problem when they have the resources. Russia has many dedicated game rangers who were thrown out of work by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. A group of international organizations led by American environmental investigator Steven Galster cobbled together the funding to put rangers back to work, and the newly formed patrols have been in the field since January 1994. The so-called Amba patrols have been working to disrupt poachers and their trade networks. Amba was given a boost this summer when Prime Minister Chernomyrdin issued...
...SITTING IN THE SPARSELY FURNISHED LIVING ROOM OF AN UDEGE house in southeastern Siberia while the owner tries to sell me a tiger skin and bones. My cover is that I am part of a group of American businessmen here for a week of bird watching. The other "bird watchers" consist of Steven Galster, an environmental investigator, Anthony Suau, a TIME photographer, and Sergei Shaitarov, a Russian environmentalist who works with Galster. My ludicrously rudimentary disguise consists of a borrowed pair of binoculars. If the tiger trader asks me to name one species of local bird, we are sunk...
...private environmental-security organization called the Investigative Network, which helps fund the antipoaching team. Seeing a group of Americans in Krasny Yar, Leonid, the poacher/trader, had approached Sergei and offered his services as a hunting guide. After a short conversation it turned out that Leonid had a tiger skin and bones he wanted to sell. Sergei arranged for us to see the skin later...