Word: wildness
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...Tilson, director of conservation at Minnesota Zoo, co-author of a new edition of the encyclopedic Tigers of the World and, with decades of fieldwork in Asia's tiger habitats under his belt, an authority - maybe the authority - on our most endangered big cat. "I've never seen a wild tiger...
...While the allergy is incurable, Tilson might yet see his first wild tiger, in a central Chinese wilderness he is playing an almost godlike role in creating. Thanks to a unique collaboration between Minnesota Zoo, China's State Forestry Administration (SFA), and a Bangkok-based environmental financier called International Consultancy Europe (ICE), a plan is under way to reintroduce the South China tiger, the rarest of the world's five surviving subspecies, back into its natural habitat. In this Year of the Tiger, the project has secured $3 million to restore a 250,000-acre (100,000 hectare) nature reserve...
...Tigers have never before been reintroduced to the wild. This is partly because scarce conservation resources are usually devoted to what Tilson calls "a failed strategy": protecting what few tiger habitats remain. "There needs to be a new paradigm," says Tilson. His answer? "Let's create wildernesses, as opposed to trying to protect the little fragments that are left." Hopes for resurrecting the South China subspecies rest largely on a captive population of 67 tigers, held in zoos across China. It will be challenging. Derived from just six animals - two male, four female - caught between 1958 and 1970, they...
...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...
...That's all it took for an intoxicated Canadian to start badgering me. On Friday evening, I was on my way to Vancouver's Waterfront Station to catch a train to Robson Square, the downtown area filled with bars, restaurants and nightclubs that was sure to get a little wild if Canada beat Slovakia in the men's hockey semifinals. A young man wearing a red hockey jersey and red paint on both cheeks staggered over to me as I walked toward the station. "Hey, how do you f______ get downtown?" he asked slowly, putting his hand on my shoulder...