Tiger

• 1. Introduction

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  The tiger, Panthera tigris, holds a distinction that almost no other animal on earth can claim: in a 2004 online poll drawing more than 50,000 participants from 73 countries, it was voted the world's favourite animal, edging out the dog with 21% of the vote. That result says something remarkable about a creature that most people will never see in the wild. It also raises a question worth sitting with. How did an animal of such immense power and such lethal precision become the one thing that humanity, across every continent and culture, collectively chose to adore?

  To understand the tiger is to follow a story that runs through the ancient rock shelters of India, the amphitheatres of Rome, the Las Vegas stage and the quietly patrolled forest corridors of Nepal. It is a story about an apex predator that has lost at least 93% of its historic range since the early 20th century. And it is a story about what it means to share a planet with something both magnificent and endangered.

• 2. A Body Built for Ambush

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  At its largest, the tiger stretches 2.8 metres from head to tail-tip and stands 1.1 metres at the shoulder. The canine teeth, the longest in the cat family, measure 6.4 to 7.6 cm. The front claws retract completely and can reach 10 cm in length. A single swipe from those wide front paws is capable of stunning or fracturing the skull of a water buffalo.

  The tiger is not a pursuit predator. It is a patient one. It will crouch in foliage, switching between slow creeping advances and complete stillness, and can hold a single position for as long as a day before a prey animal wanders close enough to trigger an attack. That threshold is typically within 30 metres. A sprint speed of 56 km/h and a leaping range of 10 m make it devastatingly effective at that distance, though it abandons chases quickly if the target outpaces it.

  The kill itself is methodical. Most often the tiger seizes the throat and holds, relying on strangulation rather than blood loss. Bite force at the canine tips averages 1,234.3 newtons. Gripping the throat keeps the cat out of range of horns, antlers and hooves. Success rates across hunting tigers vary enormously, from a low of 5% to a high of 50%, and a single adult may need to eat as much as 50 kg of meat in one feeding session.

  The famous orange coat, far from being conspicuous, serves the tiger's hunting strategy directly. A Fourier analysis study found that the vertical striping patterns align with the visual structure of the tiger's forest environment. More surprising still, the tiger's main prey species are colour-blind and likely perceive that orange fur as a shade of green, indistinguishable from the vegetation around it.

• 3. Where Tigers Live

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  At its historical peak, the tiger's range stretched from eastern Turkey and northern Iran through Central Asia to the Russian Far East, and south through the Indian subcontinent, Indochina, and the islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali. As of 2022, that range had collapsed to less than 7% of what it once was.

  India now holds the largest single extent of global tiger habitat, at 300,508 km2 as of 2020, followed by Russia with 195,819 km2. The species adapts to a remarkable range of environments: mangrove forests in the Sundarbans, temperate Korean pine forests in the Amur-Ussuri region, and mountain forests at elevations up to 4,200 metres in Bhutan. In Jim Corbett National Park in northern India, camera trapping between 2010 and 2015 found a stable population density of 12 to 17 individuals per 100 km2 in a surveyed area of 521 km2. By contrast, in an unprotected, selectively logged forest reserve in northern Malaysia, density dropped to as low as 0.3 adult tigers per 100 km2.

  The tiger is also a long-range traveller. Individuals have been recorded dispersing up to 650 km to reach other tiger populations. Young males move further than females; in Chitwan National Park, four radio-collared females dispersed between 0 and 43.2 km, while ten males covered between 9.5 and 65.7 km. Wildlife corridors that connect protected areas are, for this reason, not merely useful additions to conservation plans. They are essential to the species' genetic survival.

• 4. Subspecies and Their Fates

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  Nine subspecies of tiger have been proposed since the early 19th century: the Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, South China, Siberian, Caspian, Javan, Bali and Sumatran. The scientific community has not fully agreed on how to count them.

  In 1999, several proposed subspecies were questioned on the grounds that museum specimens used to distinguish them were not reliably representative of wild populations. A two-subspecies framework was proposed and reaffirmed in 2015 through analysis of morphological, ecological and mitochondrial DNA data, grouping all mainland Asian tigers under Panthera tigris tigris and all island tigers under Panthera tigris sondaica. A 2018 whole-genome sequencing study of 32 samples from six living putative subspecies produced different results, finding them to be distinct and separate clades. A 2023 study supported all nine original subspecies. The IUCN Cat Specialist Group states that the subspecific taxonomy of this species is currently under review.

  Three subspecies are already gone. The Bali tiger went extinct in the 1940s. The Javan tiger is thought to have disappeared by the 1980s. The Caspian tiger, which ranged from Turkey to the area around the Caspian Sea and was genetically close to the Siberian tiger, has been extinct since the 1970s. The South China tiger has not been confirmed in the wild since the 1970s and is considered extinct there as of 2001; it survives only in captivity. In the Sumatran subspecies, anti-poaching units in the Kerinci Seblat landscape removed 362 tiger snare traps and seized 91 tiger skins during 2005 to 2016, and annual poaching rates rose alongside rising skin prices.

• 5. The Poaching Crisis

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  Between 2000 and 2022, at least 3,377 tigers were confiscated in 2,205 seizures across 28 countries. Those seizures included 665 live individuals, 654 dead ones, 1,313 whole tiger skins, 16,214 body parts including bones, teeth, paws, claws and whiskers, and 1.1 tonnes of meat. India alone accounted for 759 seizures involving parts from 893 tigers.

  Demand for tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine is a documented driver of that trade. Tiger bone glue is the prevailing tiger product purchased for medicinal purposes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. So-called tiger farm facilities in China and Southeast Asia breed tigers for their parts, but research suggests these operations increase overall demand for tiger products rather than relieving pressure on wild populations.

  In southern Myanmar between March 2017 and January 2020, 630 documented hunting activities were discovered in a single reserve forest of approximately 1,000 km2. Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park in Laos was once considered the last significant site for the tiger in that country. It has not been recorded there since at least 2013.

  Poaching is not only a rural problem. Between 2003 and 2012, 292 illegal tiger parts were confiscated at US ports of entry from personal baggage, air cargo and mail. In Bangladesh, tiger body parts are trafficked through land borders, airports and seaports to 15 countries including India, China, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan and the United Kingdom.

• 6. Conservation in Practice

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  In 1973, India founded the National Tiger Conservation Authority and Project Tiger. By 2022, the country had established 53 tiger reserves covering 75,796 km2. Between 2006 and 2018, India's tiger population recovered across an area of about 138,200 km2. The 2022 estimate puts India's wild tiger count at 3,167 to 3,682 individuals, the largest population of any country.

  Nepal's results are just as striking. Anti-poaching operations launched in 2010 brought increased coordination and intelligence sharing between agencies and produced many years of what authorities described as zero poaching. The country's tiger population doubled within a decade; as of 2022, Nepal holds an estimated 316 to 355 wild tigers.

  In Russia, hunting the tiger has been banned since 1952. Increased anti-poaching patrol efforts in four protected areas during 2011 to 2014 contributed to stabilising the population and protecting prey species. In 2019, China and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding for transboundary cooperation between Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park and Land of the Leopard National Park, establishing wildlife corridors and joint monitoring along the shared border.

  In Kazakhstan, preparations for tiger reintroduction in Ile-Balkash Nature Reserve are already underway, including habitat restoration and reintroduction of prey species. Coordinated zoo breeding programs have built enough genetic diversity in captive tigers to serve as a safeguard against extinction in the wild, though as of 2022 the global wild population estimate stood at between 5,638 and 5,899 individuals.

• 7. Tiger in Human Culture

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  A painting in the Bhimbetka rock shelters in India, dated to 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, shows a tiger being hunted. It is among the earliest direct evidence of a relationship between humans and tigers that has never stopped being complicated. An estimated 80,000 tigers were killed between 1875 and 1925 alone, taken as trophies by both Asian rulers and European colonists.

  The Champawat Tiger, a tigress from Nepal and India, killed more than 430 people at the beginning of the 20th century before Jim Corbett shot her. She had broken teeth and could not kill normal prey. Tiger attacks in the Sundarbans caused 1,396 human deaths between 1935 and 2006, according to official Bangladesh Forest Department records.

  In ancient China, the tiger was called the king of the forest and symbolised imperial power. In Chinese astrology it is the third of twelve zodiac symbols. In Hinduism, the tiger is the vehicle of Durga, the goddess of feminine power. In Korean mythology, tigers serve as messengers of the Mountain Gods. William Blake's 1794 poem "The Tyger" asks how God could create both the lamb and the tiger. Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, published in 1894, made Shere Khan a symbol of mortal danger.

  In circuses, Clyde Beatty performed with as many as 40 tigers and lions at once, using chairs, whips and guns. Siegfried & Roy performed with white tigers in Las Vegas until 2003, when a tiger attacked Roy during a live show. Mabel Stark, by contrast, became one of Ringling Bros' biggest attractions and had a long career despite her small frame. By 2009, tigers were the most traded circus animals. Since then, pressure from animal rights groups and shifts in public appetite have led many countries to restrict or ban such performances. In the United States, private ownership of big cats was banned in 2022; before that law took effect, only 6% of the country's captive tiger population in 2020 was housed in facilities approved by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.