While rangers patrol huge territories on bicycles armed with 1920's weapons, tiger poachers roam with modern GPS technology and brand new vehicles, killing tigers into extinction.
The Tiger Summit which started on Sunday, sought to change all this. Top politicians from 13 countries, such as India, China and Indonesia, gathered in St Petersburg, Russia, hosted by PM Vladimir Putin. The goal is to reverse the declining rate, and to double the population by 2022, under the Global Tiger Initiative. A purposed $330 million dollars to be spent over the next five years to fund equipment and people.
Leonardo DeCaprio a hands-on advocate for tiger preservation, announced today that he will donate $1 million of his own money.
According to Moscow Times, there are only an estimated 300-400 Amur Tigers left in the world. Some species have already gone extinct.
Only three per cent of the wild tigers remain alive today than from a century ago, and three subspecies — Bali, Javan, and Caspian — have become extinct. Since 1998, conservation efforts have not worked, with a further one third population declining. There are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild. And the ones that are left occupy only seven per cent of the range they used to.
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