As China prepares to usher in the Year of the Tiger next week, a massive publicity drive has begun in neighboring India, where the big cat is the national animal, to save it from extinction.
Conservation group WWF-India has enlisted the support of sports stars and celebrities to raise awareness of the threat, citing government estimates that there are just over 1,400 tigers left in the wild.
The campaign was launched at the end of last month and has so far seen more than 75,000 people pledge their support on www.saveourtigers.com.
“Stripey,” a cute tiger cub who features in the print, online and television advertisements, also has more than 70,000 fans on the Internet social networking site Facebook and over 2,500 followers on micro-blogging site Twitter.
“Just 1,411 left. You can make a difference,” the ad says, urging people to lobby politicians to do more to protect the animal.
Diwakar Sharma, associate director for species conservation at WWF-India, said they had been delighted with the response which they hoped would push the issue up the political agenda.
“Public opinion is a must for this,” he said. “Public-private partnership can change things ... What we can do is try to influence this public opinion.”
The tiger holds a special place for Indians and has become an icon of the country’s cultural and natural heritage. But despite conservation efforts over a number of years, Sharma said the situation was now “critical.”
WWF-India has been working since 1973 to protect tigers, leading to the creation of special reserves and protected areas in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
The global wild tiger population is thought to be at an all-time low of 3,200, down from about 20,000 in the 1980s.
As elsewhere across Southeast Asia, tiger numbers are threatened by population growth, with a loss of natural habitat to agriculture and available prey leading them to encroach on human settlements in search of food.
A British-based organization, the Environmental Investigation Agency, said last year China was turning a blind eye to the illegal trade in tiger parts and pelts. Many of the body parts used for their supposed medicinal properties and as aphrodisiacs, are smuggled to China from India via Nepal. New Delhi recently asked Beijing for its help to control trafficking but no official agreement was reached.
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