Why Save Tigers? · 4:21pm Jun 29th, 2019
Many years ago, the tiger roamed the Asian continent in great numbers. Walking through the forests with no enemies. At least until man came along with his gun. Sport hunting was a popular pass time in India, and tigers were a favorite trophy among hunters. There were no laws on how many tigers could be killed or anything like that. So it comes as no surprise that this intense hunting caused the tiger population to go into steep decline. Luckily, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time made tiger hunting illegal in India by 1968. Then in 1973, she launched Project Tiger, which was inaugurated in Corbett National Park. They had villages resettle to places away from tiger habitat, and tiger numbers seemed to recover. During the 1980's, the tiger population grew by a lot, tigers were being counted by their pug marks or footprints, as they believed these were as unique as human fingerprints. Now, the project was now viewed as an amazing success. Unfortunately, things went from great, to downright horrible. In the 1990's, poaching became a much more serious threat, this was fueled by the chinese demand for tiger bone for medicinal purposes, which there's no proof they have medicinal properties. However, the protection was a joke, despite all the proof that poaching was a huge threat, the people at Project Tiger denied that poaching was of any real serious threat. They still kept telling the people that the pug mark method was accurate, and according to them, there should have been many tigers in Sariska National Park. However, sometime later the huge weakness in this method made itself very clear. It was revealed that the tigers of Sariska had gone extinct, all because of poaching. There were 300 forest staff members at Sariska, some were old, untrained and what not, but that doesn't excuse the others, and that many staff should have been more than enough to keep out poachers, but were unable to. This, as Valmik Thapar describes it, was a national disgrace. Panna also had a poaching problem, Raghu Chundawat knew it, however, the people at Project Tiger denied that there was a poaching problem at Panna, and they confiscated his research, and basically kicked him out of the park. Luckily, an investigation concluded that Project Tiger was a flawed program, and the pug mark system is no longer considered accurate. Project Tiger was scrapped, and replaced by the National Tiger Conservation Authority. This is what can happen when people lose the will to save a species, the reason for Project Tiger's success was the political will of Indira Gandhi, whenever something went wrong, she'd be there to fix it. Many people will ask this question.
"Why should we care about saving tigers?"
There are many reasons why we should care about wild tigers, and so, let's look at the situation shall we?
Ecologically important
The tiger is an apex predator, and being one, they keep the populations of deer, wild pig, gaur, buffalo and so on in check. When top predators are removed from an ecosystem, that will create an unbalance in national parks, as it would allow prey populations to explode and eat basically destroy the habitats. When tigers do hunt, they go for the weak, sick, wounded, or basically the animals that are in a way undesireable in a population, and this makes prey populations healthier and stronger.
Helps protect other species
When you protect the tiger, you protect the habitat, and in doing so, you end up protecting other animals like elephants, rhinos, leopards, and so on that share the tigers range, tiger reserves also provide good habitat for pollinators which just happen to help increase both the quality and quantity of crops that need pollinators that surround tiger reserves. Common sense really.
Helpful to Humans
Yes, tigers do attack people, and sometimes become maneaters. So one wonders how protecting tigers helps people, here's how. In the Russian Far East, scientists learned that Amur Tigers kill and drive out wolves to the point of almost local extinction. Wolves have higher success rates than tigers, and are therefore, worse for local hunters. So conservationists in the region have used this argument to basically intimidate hunters into not killing tigers as that would mean wolves would be coming in. This intolerance of other predators by tigers helps people in Bhutan because a recent study has shown that the tigers drive leopards and dholes away from where locals graze livestock, and the two smaller predators end up near the crop fields where they hunt deer and wild pigs. Not only that, but a study called "Making the hidden visible: Economic valuation of tiger reserves in India" the authors state this.
"Tiger reserves are sources of employment. Apart from the staff involved in operation of day-to-day activities, tiger reserves provide valuable opportunities of employment for the local community. Considering the lack of employment opportunities at such remote places, a regular source of employment in the Tiger Reserve is highly valued by the local community."
They also state that
"The findings indicate that the monetary value of flow benefits emanating from selected tiger reserves range from US$ 128 million to US$ 271 million annually."
Moral importance
If we killed off all the tigers, future generations wouldn't have the chance to ever see a real tiger, and that just isn't fair. In general, we have the ability to kill whatever we want, but just because we can doesn't mean we should. We don't have the right to wipe out entire species from the face of the earth, as animals have as much right to live on this earth as we do.
Very well said.
5081406
Thank you
I hope more people will take the conservation of plants and animals serious. When you look up the large amount of plants and animals which have gone extinct in just the last sixty years it's pretty eye opening.
5081435
Exactly, 3 tiger subspecies have already gone extinct. The Javan, Bali, and the Caspian.
Damn straight
!!!
5081435
. They were here before us, and thus this is their rightful home, and they have a right to find a place in it as we do
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Yeah, and just thing, if this keeps up, these beautiful creations of Mother Nature won't be able to take back what was there's before we came in in it
5081450 So sad. :( I wish there was a way to bring them back.
5081467 I completely agree. I hope there will be a way to bring them back one day and people will put more effort towards conserving the wildlife we have left before it all disappears.
5081489
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As do I...there are so many people out there who have no idea how important animals like Tigers are to the ecosystem
5081487
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Alas there isn't...but at least those species are in a better places...roaming and running free in the Forests in the Sky, where nothing can harm them again
5081500 I wonder if they could use the DNA from preserved specimens to bring them back? I mean, if they have the technology to bring back a woolly mammoth, you would think the same technology could be applied to recently extinct creatures.
5081576
Believe it or not, scientists have tried to bring back the Thylacine, but I'm not sure if they're still at it.
5081606
Didn’t the last one die in a Zoo in 1936?
5081576
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I actually watched an episode on that! It was on The Most Extreme on Animal Planet...how I love that show as a kid
5081650
Think so, but they had a small corpse of a Joey in a jar with alcoholic liquid and believed they could we the DNA in it to bring one back.
5081658
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I see...if they could, then the Thylacine will have to get help to adapt to the new environment they’re in. Australia isn’t what it used to be
5081654 Oh I remember that show! It was really cool. :)
5081818
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Eeyup, those were the gold ol' days...
5081820 Yes indeed.