The Tiger

The video says it is all and it is amusing on one level in that it exposes the foolishness of photo-sessions with tigers. I don't know where it was made. It looks like India or somewhere in Asia. Correction : it is Thailand.  The whole thing is rather sick to me. Correction: very sick, sad and pathetic. I feel for the tiger. The tiger used as a prop is sick. The tiger is prodded to animate him, which is also sick.  Please can people stop doing this kind of exploitative behavior? Can humans please stop exploiting tigers and just give them enough space and then leave them alone. For Pete's sake.

They suffocate them after knocking them to the ground with their considerable bulk and the strength in their forelegs. They grab the animal with both their massive front paws. The claws sink into the animal's flesh. They are gripped tightly. The tiger then clamps his/her jaws around the prey's windpipe. The tiger then squeezes the victim's throat and holds on until it is suffocated. Unable to breathe in the vice-like grip they animal passes away quietly and quickly. The tiger will often keep its jaws around the neck for several minutes to make sure it is dead. They've experienced prey surviving and racing off in the past. The tiger pulls its prey into bushes. Tigers have enormous strength and can pull huge prey animals considerable distances over rough terrain. Tigers sometimes kill fellow big felines such as the leopard. The latter avoids the tiger! Legendary tiger strength on show as tiger pulls SUV backwards with its teeth clamped on bumper . Image: in public domain.

The way of life of the tiger is built around hunting. And each tiger lives alone and they hunt alone. In the forests of Asia where nearly all tigers live (except the Siberian tiger in the Far East of Russia) the world's biggest and greatest hunter has no choice but to hunt alone because of the dense vegetation which is their habitat.  Tiger kills a deer. They hunt alone. Image in the public domain. Hunting in a group would not be successful. Apparently, very rarely, they might hunt in a group under certain favourable circumstances but this is essentially a solitary hunter. Their method of killing is to get near as possible to the prey animal using cover from their habitat and their camouflaged coat. They approach prey downwind from the prey animal. This means that their body odour is not carried towards the prey animal which might alert them. The tiger has to get as close as possible to the targeted prey animal because they cannot sprint for great distances. They have to approach t

Scientists in China wanted to assess the personality traits of Amur tigers (Siberian tigers), which I think is an interesting concept not tried before as far as I know. They probably struggled to distinguish between different personality traits as described in humans but came up with two types: majestic and steady.  In general terms they found that the majestic tigers were healthier because they had a higher status and had (by the looks of it) first pickings of prey animals. And they mate more often. That last point begs the question as to whether majestic tigers are coveted by tigresses. Do tigresses pick and choose their male mates? It looks that way. Female lions prefer males with dark and great manes for instance. It seems that female wild cats have a method for picking out the healthiest males in order to produce healthy offspring. Tigers described as majestic are healthier than others and have sex more often. Image: MikeB. AI summary This section is a summary of the study as writ

This is a compact infographic explaining why tigers are endangered. It is a broad-brush infographic covering the main issues. India recently announced the success of Project Tiger and said that there are now 3,167 tigers in India which is more than double the 1,411 recorded when the census began in 2006. This is based on a World Wildlife Fund for Nature camera trap count . I remain pessimistic about the future prospects of the Bengal tiger in India because the human population continues to grow. Tigers need a huge amount of space. Individual males need home ranges the size of a city. The reserves are too small to sustain decent-sized tiger populations. And poachers continue to kill tigers for body parts to supply the Chinese 'superstition market' believing that eating tiger flesh and drinking tiger bone wine does them some sort of magical good. It is all BS.

If two tigers meet in the wild, will they fight? Well, the first point to make is that in the wild, each tiger has a territory about as big as a modern city. Male ranges are a lot bigger than females' and male ranges include female ranges . Territorial ownership is marked out by spraying scented urine against trees and scratching the bark with sharp claws. This is a way of tigers preventing meeting up. It's a way of keeping them apart because they realise that fights between rivals can be so damaging even to the winner that it may impair their survival. So male tigers avoid other male tigers and female tigers avoid other female tigers. When a male tiger meets a female even outside the breeding season there is a small friendly greeting using a close call sounding like: fuf-fuf-fuf . But there are two instances under which tigers might fight: times of flux and tension over resources and territory. The most sought-after resources for a male tiger in the wild are female tigers and

Well, today, we can answer the question in the title with a certain amount of accuracy because the World Wildlife Fund for Nature has recently reported that they have recorded 3,167 tigers in India which is more than double the 1,411 recorded when the census began in 2006. Camera trap counts a tiger. 7-Tiger CT_©Ullas Karanth-WCS This information is fresh in news media today and I am looking at a report in The Times dated Tuesday, April 11, 2023. They used cameras traps which made the recording of tiger numbers more accurate. In the past they used scats i.e. faeces and pug marks (paw prints) to count tigers or estimate their numbers. They know the tigers' habitats. They place 32,500 cameras in these habitats mounted on trees or posts. They take millions of photographs automatically because they are motion sensor activated. The cameras are set up in pairs which allows them to capture both sides of each tiger and record the stripes which are unique like a human fingerprint. In this w