“There are less than 3,500 tigers remaining in the world,” says K Ullas Karanth, with a curiously positive twang,” but the world has the potential to house around 45,000 tigers.”
Karanth, a senior conservation scientist at the NewYork-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and director, WCS India Program, Bangalore, was speaking at the 5th Kirloskar Vasundhara International Film festival in the city on Tuesday.
The optimism in his voice came as a surprise at a time when discussions revolving the big cat are full of dismal figures and shoddy affairs. "I think if we work in the right direction from now, we can effectively save this species," says Karanth, who has worked in the interiors of states like Karnataka and Maharashtra.
"The save tiger story, is not about individual incidents that are so glorified today. We shout on television sets, write critically about how a tiger died, but we collectively don't think of the larger picture," said Karanth. So what exactly is the big picture? "Conservation, is not like business. There is no closure here. A tigress replaces herself 15 times in her lifetime. Meaning to say that mortality and reproductive cycles of tigers are quite fast. I don't mean to say that poaching should not be our concern. But our concerns should rise from individual stories. The biggest threat to tigers in India is depletion of their chief prey like deer, wild pigs and wild cattle. As a result, although around 300,000 square kilometres of tiger habitat still remains, much of it is empty of tigers since there is not enough food for them to survive and breed successfully."
why dont we raise some food, like we do for humans, and release the food into the wild for tigers to eat?
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