Word: wright
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...this feline population could plunge to a level-around 500 cats-where in many parts of India it would no longer be able to sustain itself. At that point, they would survive almost exclusively in zoolike safari parks. "India is letting the tiger slip through its fingers," says Belinda Wright, director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. "It's going to be one of the biggest conservation debacles the world has ever known." Globally, the tiger's future looks similarly bleak. A major study released last month by the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, the World Wildlife Fund...
...ground tiger bones, whiskers and penises for use in traditional Chinese medicine. A large, unblemished pelt can fetch over $10,000, and powdered tiger bones sell for hundreds of dollars per kilogram. Neighboring Tibet has become a virtual shopping mall for tigers. In an undercover visit in 2005, conservationist Wright filmed vendors in Lhasa hawking dozens of pelts and swatches in the back rooms of stores and on street corners-an exposé that led the Dalai Lama to condemn the trade...
...Chinese demand may be driving the poaching boom, but conservationists blame New Delhi for failing to protect the tigers. Wright reserves particular ire for the government's 30-year-old showcase conservation effort, Project Tiger, which is widely regarded as understaffed and underfunded. "The government hasn't recruited any new forest staff in 15 years," she says. Remarks Valmik Thapar, one of India's foremost tiger experts and the director of a conservation group called the Ranthambhore Foundation: "The government just doesn't have the will to save the tiger...
...also need to find ways to improve the lives of tribals and other poor people." But any gain for people can be a loss for the tiger, and conservationists argue that the tribal communities sometimes assist poaching. "Every tiger that walks into the forest is a cash register," says Wright. "He represents years of funds for every poor person that lives near his habitat." A bill up for debate in parliament this month would allow tribal communities expanded land and building rights in wildlife reserves, which threatens to crowd tigers off their few remaining sanctuaries. "If they recognize the tribal...
...Hammer hero with amnesia, is a drab affair, and My Gun Is Quick buried its chance at B-minus competence with another unknown, inapt Hammer, Robert Bray. You might say that Spillane should always have played him, as he does in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. (Richard Wright, of Native Son fame, is the only other best-selling novelist I know who played his own major character in a movie. Anyone know others?) But that would be to overrate Spillane's hulking amateurism. He has fun in the movie, but maneuvers only on the surface of Hammer's tortured meanness...