The Blood of the Tiger and The Vanishing Species


Until the early 1900s, the tiger was the ruler of its terrain, an invincible predator. The true king of the jungle. It reigned supreme nearly throughout the Asian continent from Turkey to Korea; from the humid forests of South-East Asia to the snowbound forests of Siberia and the mountains beyond the Caspian Sea. Sadly, after a century of industrialization and progress, the tiger's time has come and it rules no more.

 Before the last century, there more than a hundred thousand tigers in the wild, some say hundreds of thousands. At the turn of the current century, however, tigers number less than 5,000. Although some feel that there are as many as 8,000, it would still represent a loss of more than 95% of the world's tiger population in the space of a mere 100 years. What would the next 100 years hold for the fading tiger? An animal that matches the human only in its power and cunning but cannot survive the continuing loss of habitat worldwide. When a new sub-species was announced recently in 2004, three sub-species are already extinct.

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