Tigers

The largest of the big cats, the tiger Panthera tigris has become the global face of wildlife conservation. Tigers are carnivorous mammals classified in the biological family Felidae, characterized by territorial behavior and specialized hunting skills. The tiger is listed in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species as a critically endangered species. One of the commonly voiced benefits of protecting tigers is that tiger conservation requires the protection of entire terrestrial ecosystems, essentially large areas of land, which in turn helps protect myriad other plants and animals that live in those ecosystems. Thus, tiger conservation efforts should ideally lead to larger gains in terms of the conservation of biodiversity and genetic diversity in the wild.

The recent history ...