Back in 1994, three little girls were upset by sight of a shop selling tigers' paws while traveling through China with their family. They wanted to do something about it. They sought the help of their father, Marco Ramero. The result: the Tiger Foundation, now a major player in wild tiger conservation.
Romero and his daughter Natasha visited Taipei last week to help launch a two-month fund-raising drive in cooperation with the 7-11 convenience store chain. For the Romeros, the Taiwan drive sets up a number of precedents that they hope will expand their effectiveness in funding valuable conservation and research work for wild tigers.
"In the past, we targeted corporations or individuals," Romero said. "This is the first time we have had a retail-oriented drive. According to 7-11, two million people pass through their outlets every day, so this means that there will be two million people standing next to a donation box for the Tiger Foundation every day."
"This is the first time that 7-11 has participated in a fund-raiser for animals," said Julia Sun (
The current international exposure of the foundation is remarkable when its inception in an incident on a Romero family holiday is considered. At the same time, the Romeros' commitment to the foundation as a way of educating their children, gives the Tiger Foundation a different feel from most institutional charities.
"We had no idea what we were getting into," said Romero, throwing up his arms in mock despair. He now works full-time as the foundation's managing director. "I could never give up though," he added, saying that taking up a big thing then dropping it when things got tough was not an example he wanted to give his children.
The Tiger Foundation is still relatively small as international foundations go, but it makes up for this by getting the money to where it counts most. "We spend 97 percent of donations in the field," Romero said. "For the rest, we are totally operated by volunteers." Originally Romero had thought simply to donate money to tiger conservation, but "there were simply no organization for which we had a guarantee that the money we spent would go to actually protecting tigers, rather than the organization's overheads and such." So with C$80,000 of their own money, the Romeros established their own foundation.
The commitment to the tiger, while largely coincidental, allows the foundation to make use of the animal's potent symbolism. One of the reasons that the Romeros have taken time off to visit Taiwan is "because the tiger is such an important symbol in Chinese culture." On a more practical level, Romero said that the tiger is also an important marker of the health of an ecosystem. "The tiger is an apex predator, so to protect it means protecting whole environments."
According to Romero, 95 percent of the world's tiger population has been destroyed in the past century, and estimates now put this population at around 7,000. "This is absolutely nothing," he said. "A disease could easily wipe them out altogether. They are one of the most endangered species in the world."
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