Word: tigers
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Back to the Future In half a century, the wild South China tiger population in China has been reduced from perhaps 4,000 to - Beijing disputes this - none. During Mao Zedong's time they were considered a pest and extermination campaigns were launched against them. Also taking a toll were loss of habitat, declining prey numbers and, as the economy took off, growing demand from traditional Chinese medicine for every part of the animal: whiskers, penis, bone, even feces...
...four subspecies of tiger - Siberian, Indochinese, Bengal and South China - have been all but killed off within China's borders. In 1993, Beijing banned the nation's domestic trade in tigers and their parts and, today, China is one of 175 parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which outlawed tiger trafficking globally. But Chinese demand still drives a lucrative pan-Asian trade in poached tigers, which other countries blame for the accelerating decline in their own wild populations. In India, 88 tigers were killed in 2009 - double the previous year...
...China, where tiger-hunting was legal until 1977, is not the only country with a poor record of conservation. Tigers are also found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam - but only just. A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers in the wild in Asia. Now their numbers are at an "all time low" of 3,200, estimates the WWF, which in January warned the animals could be extinct in the wild by 2022 - the next Year of the Tiger - unless new efforts are made to save them...
...Today, penalties for harming tigers in China are harsh - a villager in Yunnan province was recently jailed for 12 years for killing and eating what might well have been the country's last wild Indochinese tiger. But the laws are patchily enforced. In December the SFA released a directive promising better protection of wild tigers and a sterner crackdown on the illegal trade. Many conservationists remain unconvinced. "We've heard these words before from China," says Mike Baltzer, leader of the World Bank - backed Global Tiger Initiative at the conservation group WWF. "We're waiting to see if they really...
...Reversing a Trend Tilson's early relationship with Chinese officialdom was almost scuppered by an inconvenient truth. In 2000, he and Minnesota Zoo teamed up with the SFA to make a census of wild South China tigers. They surveyed eight reserves in seven provinces over 18 months, set up hundreds of camera traps and investigated reports of any sighting - but found none. It was the first documented case of a tiger subspecies disappearing from the wild since the Javan tiger did so in the 1970s. Western colleagues cautioned Tilson that his gloomy conclusion would irritate the SFA. "They were right...