Talk:Tiger/Extractions

= Materials Removed from the main Tiger page =

Save China's Tigers rewilding project in South Africa
The organisation Save China's Tigers working with the Wildlife Research Centre of the State Forestry Administration of China and the Chinese Tigers South Africa Trust secured an agreement on the reintroduction of Chinese Tigers into the wild. The agreement, which was signed in Beijing on 26 November 2002, calls for the establishment of a Chinese Tiger conservation model through the creation of a Pilot Reserve in China where indigenous wildlife including the South China Tiger will be reintroduced. A number of Chinese tiger cubs will be selected from zoos in China and sent to a 300 square kilometre reserve near the town of Philippolis in South Africa where they will be taught to hunt for themselves, the offspring of the trained tigers will be released into the pilot reserves in China, while the trained tigers will continue to stay in South Africa to continue breeding. A second Chinese tiger rehabilitation project is also being run in Fujian, China. It is planned that in time, successfully rehabilitated South China Tigers will be released into a Pilot Reserve in China. China will conduct the work of surveying land, restoring habitat and prey with in the Pilot reserve. The first Chinese Tigers are expected to be reintroduced into the wild to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008

Save China's Tigers understands that the tigers must know how hunt prey and has to be able to defend itself, in order to survive in the wild. Once in captivity for long, an animal will lose its ability to survive in the wild, such as skills like hunting and self-defence. It will inevitably die once released. Thus Save China's Tigers started a re-habilitation programme to help the tigers regain their surviving skills in the wild. Some re-habilitation steps taken by the project includes feeding the tiger cubs with carcasses of small game. Once the tigers are eating and opening the new food items, live animals similar to those taken dead will be occasionally introduced to the cubs. Larger food items and larger live animals will also be used for the rewilding training subsequently.



The prey species provided for the training are small animals like rabbits and guinea fowls and medium sized antelopes like blesbucks and springbucks. There are plans to introduce larger games like the Blue wildebeest, the tigers have been provided with wildebeest carcasses and will soon be presented with live wildebeests for them to hunt. The prey needed for wild training of the tigers do not have to be the same as those in the original food chain of the tigers. Tigers’ food menu is fairly extensive: deer, antelope and wild boars etc are tigers’ primary food in their habitat. Once a tiger knows how to hunt the same sized wild animals, it will not mind what kind of prey animal it is.

No captive-born large predators have ever been successfully reintroduced into the wild before. This is the first ever experiment by any organization and country, to attempt to save a large carnivore by re-introducing them into the wild. It is a daring and heroic experiment of combining in-situ and ex-situ conservation. Its success will have a profound impact on international conservation and should set precedence for zoos throughout the world.

Controversial release of a hand reared hybrid Tigress in the wild
Tara, a hand-reared (supposedly Bengal) tigress acquired from Twycross Zoo in England in July 1976 was trained by Billy Arjan Singh and released to the wild in Dudhwa National Park, India with the permission of India’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in an attempt to prove the experts wrong that zoo bred hand reared Tigers can ever be released in the wild with success. In the 1990s, some tigers from Dhudhwa were observed which had the typical appearance of Siberian tigers: white complexion, pale fur, large head and wide stripes. With recent advances in science it was subsequently found that Siberian Tigers genes have polluted the otherwise pure Bengal Tiger gene pool of Dudhwa National Park. It was proved later that Twycross Zoo had been irresponsible and maintained no breeding records and had given India a hybrid Siberian-Bengal Tigress instead. Dudhwa tigers constitute about 1% of India's total wild population, but the possibility exists of this genetic pollution spreading to other tiger groups, at its worst, this could jeopardize the Bengal tiger as a distinct subspecies.

Controversial crossbred Siberian/Bengal tiger Rewilding project in South Africa
There is a Tiger rewilding project started by John Varty (South African conservationist and filmmaker) in 2000. This project involves bringing captive-bred zoo tiger cubs, and for them to be trained by their human trainers so that the tigers can regain their predatory instincts. Once they prove that they can sustain themselves in the wild, they would be released into the wilderness of Africa to fend for themselves. Their trainers, John Varty and Dave Salmoni (Big Cat expert and zoologist), have to teach them how to stalk, hunt, and most importantly to associate hunting with food. All of these instincts would be taught to them by their biological mothers in the wild.

Two tigers have already succeeded in re-wilding and two more tigers are currently undergoing their re-wilding training. The tiger canyons project is not an attempt to introduce tigers into Africa, but an experiment to create a free-ranging, self-sustaining tiger population outside Asia. From this population, third and fourth generations of tigers can be returned to parks in Asia that meet a set of criteria which give the tigers a chance of surviving in Asia. This project is featured by The Discovery Channel as a documentary, "Living With Tigers". It was voted one of the best discovery channel's documentary in 2003.

A strong criticism about this project is with the chosen cubs. Experts state that the four tigers (Ron, Julie, Seatao and Shadow) involved in the rewilding project are not purebred Bengal tigers and should not be used for breeding. The tigers are bred by Ron Witfield, world renowned as having the best breeding line of Bengal tigers, and the tigers' genealogy can be traced back through many generations. However, the four tigers are not recorded in the Bengal tiger Studbook and should not be deemed as purebred Bengal Tigers. Many tigers in the world's zoos are genetically impure and there is no reason to suspect these four are not among them. The 1997 International Tiger Studbook lists the current global captive population of Bengal tigers at 210 tigers. All of the studbook-registered captive population is maintained in Indian zoos, except for one female Bengal tiger in North America. It is important to note that Ron and Julie (2 of the tigers) were bred in the USA and hand-raised at Bowmanville Zoo in Canada, while Seatow and Shadow are two tigers bred in South Africa.

The Tigers in the Tiger Canyons Project have recently been confirmed to be crossbred Siberian/Bengal tigers. Tigers that are not genetically pure are not allowed to be released into the wild and will not be able to participate in the Tiger Species Survival Plan which aims to breed genetically pure tiger specimens and individuals. In short, these tigers do not have any genetic value.