We had 100,000 tigers back in the early 1900s. Now there are only about 3,200 left in the wild -

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/01/2...s=techchannelAP

Do you think there's hope to keep them from going extinct? 3,200 is less than the population of most towns!

That is very sad.
Tigers are amazing creatures and it would be so sad if we were to lose tem.

But I must let you into a secret.

Tigers, as we all know, are very dangerous beasts, and, when I was young, I wanted to explore the whole world.

The thought of encountering a tiger terrified me, so, when I heard that they were nearing extinction, I felt much better ~ thinking & hoping that they might have all gone by the time I was old enough to go exploring.

Well, I haven't yet got to exlore the tigers' homelands, and, thankfully, the tigers are not yet extinct ~ hopefully they never will be.

But I can certainly understand those, who shoot tigers, for fear of them hurting or killing their children.

That's sad i like tigers strong beast (Cats), show the greatness of nature

i hope those numbers go up and other reasons they are going down is because careless humans destroy there homes!!!!

we need to stop people from killing them and there homes!!

there are many other animals that need help whales are almost extinct!!

if people can help we should
___________________________
JMD

That is not where the extinction is coming from. The hunters that black market their pelt and other body parts are the culprit. We are not the tigers usual pray.

And of course those that buy these black market products are the ultimate cause of the extinction of a lot of hunted animals.

Hunters aren't always the culprits, though I admit that in the tigers case they are. In the U.S., wolves are excessively hunted and almost gone from America because people veiw them as savage, harmful beasts who distroy property - and not the beautiful creatures who keep down deer populations (sorry, but otherwise deer die of disease and starvation). If people were actually aware of what they were killing, people would do something. But like PDM said, people tend to see only the harmful side of a animal...

There was recently (Nov 2010) the first annual tiger summit held in Russia which was focused on bringing together representatives from every tiger-containing nation to discuss how to save the populations. They still have the 3,200 population number on their site -

http://www.tigersummit.ru/eng/index

so it seems at least that things are stable at 3,200 right now. They have full reports from every single country that has tigers, discussing the number of tigers they have and what they are going to do to help protect them.

It is a huge help that China is taking a stand against tiger-based medicines. It is of course hard to change an entire culture overnight. Imagine in the US that they suddenly said "all people - do not drink alcohol". People would still find ways to drink alcohol because it was part of what they liked to do. We of course did that experiment in the US and it failed. Hopefully in China their quest to stop tiger medicines will be more successful.

I do have hope because there was a very similar situation with ivory in Africa, and the ivory ban has met with some success. So I hope with time and education that we can have the same success with training people not to crave tiger parts.

I feel the fate of tigers is very dire, so normally this would be very high on my list of causes to support, but I think with this Tiger Summit and the steady focus the countries are now putting on the issue, that it already has momentum. I.e. they are getting millions of dollars, they know what they need to do, and now they have to implement it.

I think there might be other areas where we would have more of an impact with our efforts.

Top predators in general are very vulnerable, world wide. It's a big problem.