10 Animals we have to saveAnimal Rescue
There are now just a few thousand tigers left. Seven hundred mountain gorillas. A hundred Iberian lynx. Can we do anything to help them? Emine Saner of The Guardian looks at 10 animals we just have to save - and how you can get involved.

1. Tiger - there are twice as many privately owned tigers in America as there are in the wild across the world. Outside zoos and private collections, there are thought to be just 3,000 and 4,500 Bengal tigers, 1,500 Indo-Chinese tigers and 500 Sumatran tigers. There may possibly be 20-30 South China tigers left - if they aren’t extinct already.  In the past 150 years, 93% of tigers’ original habitat has been lost; in the past 100 years, the world’s tiger population has declined by 95%. Habitat loss results in a lack of prey for tigers and makes for fragmented populations; this in turn causes inbreeding and all the health and fertility problems that go with it.

Last month, the WWF warned that illegal coffee plantations in Indonesia were threatening wildlife, especially Sumatran tigers. The beans were being bought, unknowingly, by some of the world’s biggest coffee manufacturers, including NestlĂ© and Kraft. More generally, poaching is one of the biggest threats, especially to Bengal tigers. Everything from their bones to their organs have historically been key ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), although most practitioners no longer use them. “But some do,” says Mark Wright, science advisor for the WWF. “Even now, products containing ingredients from tigers are still sold in this country.” This is illegal, by the way. “It’s for us to say we don’t want this in our country. We need to take away the demand at this end of the supply chain.”

What can we do? Write to coffee manufacturers and ask them to show that their products come from sustainable sources. Insist they put in place rigorous chain-of-custody controls to ensure they don’t support illegal plantations. Keep an eye out for practitioners of TCM who are still selling products containing ingredients derived from tigers. Contact your local police wildlife crime officer, the National Wildlife Crime Unit www.nwcu.police.uk or Crimestoppers (0800 555111 ).

As well as WWF, there are several tiger conservation projects that are worth backing, including the Wildlife Trust of India and the Phoenix Fund in Russia www.phoenix.vl.ru which is working to protect the Amur tiger. (more…)

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