A news byte from Environmental Newswire last October described the death of a Bengal tiger about 700 miles southeast of New Delhi, India, after it was caught in a wild boar trap without food or water for days. Forest rangers tried to save the tiger but it was just too far gone. An estimated 3,000 tigers remain in India; including subspecies, 5,000 to 5,500 in their range from eastern Asia and southeastern Siberia and western Indonesia.
Also in October, police in Indonesia had to order villagers not to hurt tigers, monkeys and other rare wildlife that were forced into populated areas by several months of severe forest fires. The warning came despite fears prompted because a tiger mauled a villager to death on the Island of Sumatra. The only good news was that four adult tigers were reported having come down out of the mountains on the island of Java. The news was good because Javanese tigers were thought to be extinct.
Human alteration of habitat remains the primary threat to tigers. Because tigers hunt in bush and forests, rapid human conversion of land for farmland shrinks the tigers' habitat. Destruction of mangrove forests threatens tigers in certain coastal areas of India and Bangladesh. The Asian taste for tiger parts for various potions also is a threat; bones, penis and pelts all have value. By the way, this is the Chinese "Year of the Tiger" and World Wildlife Fund has launched a Year of the Tiger Conservation Action Plan.
Often it is easy to sit back and shake our heads at these far away territorial collisions between humans and such wildlife. We can sit back nonchalantly without imagining what it is like to live with a creature such as a tiger roaming around our backyards. But not all of us can sit because the United States has its own wild cat problems.
California, it seems, took seven years to spend $26 million to protect 33 square miles, which is enough for only one-third part of a cougar since just one needs as much as 100 square miles, according to a November 1997 article by T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times.
Some conservationists aren't all that upset, however, because they argue that it is the quality of the 33 acres that is important, according to Miller. Some of the acreage, it seems, was purchased as corridor land to connect larger areas so that, in effect, the actual territory a cat has to play in was enlarged. This seems to make sense, particularly if it leads cougars to stay away from people, which hasn't been happening in areas like the
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