There was an investigation into Kaplanov’s death, but there were also
complications, made worse by a puzzling lack of interest on the part of
the investigator who had come all the way from Moscow. As a result,
people who are still alive and intimate with the case’s details feel quite
sure that the wrong man went to jail and that Kaplanov’s murderer, who
was well known around the town of Lazo, lived out his days a free man.
Wisely, perhaps, he relocated to a small river town about twelve miles
away. Looming over the floodplain there is an exposed ridge studded with
eruptions of stone that form the enormous and unmistakable lower jaw of
a tiger. The fang alone is more than a hundred feet high.
Today, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin” remains a milestone in the
field of tiger research, and was a first step in the pivotal transformation
of the Amur tiger—and the species as a whole—from trophy-vermin to
celebrated icon. In 1947, Russia became the first country in the world to
recognize the tiger as a protected species. However, active protection was
sporadic at best, and poaching and live capture continued. In spite of this,
the Amur tiger population has rebounded to a sustainable level over the
past sixty years, a recovery unmatched by any other subspecies of tiger.
Even with the upsurge in poaching over the past fifteen years, the Amur
tiger has, for now, been able to hold its own.
There have been some hidden costs. Since the Amur tiger’s population
crash, these animals no longer seem to grow as large as they once did. It
wouldn’t be the first time this kind of anthropogenic selection has
occurred: the moose of eastern North America went through a similar
process of “trophy engineering” at roughly the same time. Sport hunters
wanted bull moose with big antlers, and local guides were eager to
accommodate them. Thus, the moose with the biggest racks were
systematically removed from the gene pool while the smaller-antlered
bulls were left to pass on their more modest genes, year after year.
Scientists have speculated that something similar may have happened to
the Amur tiger, with one result being that postwar specimens no longer
seem to be much larger than their Bengal counterparts. In Primorye today
one would be hard pressed to find an Amur tiger weighing more than five
hundred pounds, but that is still a huge cat by any era’s measure. The
ron
(Ron)
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