Wildlife group, stars urge Indians to save tiger

Phil Hazlewood (AFP) Google News 9 Feb 10;

MUMBAI — As China prepares to usher in the Year of the Tiger next week, a massive publicity drive has begun in neighbouring 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, fronted by India cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and top footballer Bhaichung Bhutia, was launched at the end of January 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, which once roamed freely across India and the sub-continent.

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 told AFP. "Public-private partnership can change things... What we can do is try to influence this public opinion."

Feared and worshipped in equal measure, the tiger -- one of the world's largest predators -- 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" and conservationists cannot do the work alone.

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 and 100,000 a century ago. At the turn of the 20th century, there were an estimated 40,000 tigers in India.

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.

Hunting for sport -- now banned worldwide but once seen as a status symbol, particularly during British colonial times -- and poaching, particularly for traditional Chinese medicine, have had devastating effects on numbers.

A British-based organisation, the Environmental Investigation Agency, said last year China -- which is believed to have fewer than 50 wild tigers -- was turning a blind eye to the lucrative illegal trade in tiger parts and pelts.

Many of the body parts, like claws and bones, 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.

Poachers killed 32 tigers last year and three already this year, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

There have also been criticisms that government initiatives to crack down on poaching and wildlife crime are failing, due to a bloated bureaucracy and a lack of awareness.

Forestry officials say Maoist rebels, active in seven of India's 38 tiger reserves, are also hindering conservation efforts.

"State governments are certainly not fully aware of (the situation)," said Sharma. "The Indian federal structure allows states to be independent from central government. However policies are not implemented.

"The environment is for all of our well-being, not only for tigers. We know that wherever tigers have gone, the forests are totally degraded with an effect on air and water quality."

India Celebrities Add Glitz To Tiger Conservation
Matthias Williams, PlanetArk 12 Feb 10;

NEW DELHI - 1,411 -- that's the number on the lips of Indian celebrities fronting a new campaign to save tigers which was launched ahead of the Chinese lunar Year of the Tiger -- a time some conservationists fear will lead to a spike in demand for the endangered animal's body parts.

"Just 1,411 left. You can make a difference," is the message being broadcast on everything from TV adverts, Facebook and YouTube, in what organisers say is India's biggest ever campaign to conserve the dwindling numbers of its national animal.

Since January, the environmental group WWF India has spearheaded a public awareness campaign, led by the Indian cricket and football captains, which has received close to 100,000 pledges of support on its website.

Poaching and loss of habitat have caused tiger numbers to plunge from around 40,000 at the turn of the 20th century in India, a country with patchy environmental awareness and uneven local governance needed for an effective crackdown on poachers.

Conservation has not hitherto been seen as a big vote winner in India, where hundreds of millions live below the poverty line.

"The response has been overwhelming," Diwakar Sharma, Associate Director of the Species Conservation Programme at WWF India, told Reuters.

"I hope some of this could be transferred into votes, and politicians realise that the public now wants tiger conservation across India, and the tiger conservation gets more focus throughout India."

India is a key player in efforts to boost the global tiger population, which numbers just a few thousand and some wildlife experts say could be extinct in 20 years.

"All these things have been tried before," Belinda Wright, director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, said of the multimedia campaign. "I think the difference with this particular campaign is that it has brought all the elements together ... the coverage has been fantastic."

"They're not telling anybody anything new. But what they're doing is creating a constituency which will then create political will," she added.

India's Environment Minister said at the end of last year that Indian tigers were in a "very, very precarious" state and could be wiped out in nearly half the country's tiger reserves.

Conservationists say the trade in skin and bones is booming to countries such as China, which has banned the use of tiger parts in medicine but where everything from fur to whiskers to eyeballs to bones, are still used.

WWF's Sharma said the campaign was timely ahead of China's Year of the Tiger, which begins on Sunday and which India fears will spur poachers and smugglers operating in its forests to capitalise on increased demand for tiger parts during the lunar new year.

Tiger skins sell as rugs and cloaks on the black market, and can fetch up to $20,000 in countries like China.

New Delhi has been a vocal critic of the Chinese use of tiger parts in medicine, and wants its neighbour to phase out tiger farms it says violate international agreements.

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Miral Fahmy)