Today is International Tiger Day, a celebration held annually on the 29th of July. It was started in 2010 at the St. Petersburg Tiger Summit to raise awareness of and encourage tiger conservation.
The numbers of wild tigers in areas like China and Bhutan are getting lower by the day but poaching efforts have hardly declined. The current population face three main threats: decline of prey, poaching and loss of habitat.
Many Asian forests are cramped with trees but there is hardly any wildlife. It is estimated that an adult tiger needs to kill 50-75 ungulates every year. However, in order to have adequate prey, conservation efforts for them cannot be neglected too as quite a number are endangered species as well.
Countering poaching efforts is something governments should pay greater attention to. One direct way to show support is to invest more in the development and training of professional rangers dedicated to protecting the tiger population.
Threats to habitat include deforestation and fragmentation. This looks inevitable as the world continues to modernize and more land is required for increasing human populations. A proposed plan to combat this issue is to connect protected areas through a structure of conservation units and ecological passages which target to preserve the integrity of metapopulations.
At the end of the day, the global wild tiger population will only cease to lessen if the locals make an effort to care for them. Despite being afraid of it, many local people of tigers' ranges regard this mammal as an essential and significant component of their environment.
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