Epilogue

AS OF 2008, THERE WERE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED

AND FIFTY tigers living in Primorye, southern Khabarovsk Territory,
and their adjacent border regions—down from a postwar high of roughly
five hundred in the late 1980s. (By comparison, the state of Texas, a place
that has no natural history of tigers, has more than two thousand of them
living in various forms of captivity.) This may sound like a lot of tigers,
but it is nothing compared to what the wild population was a hundred
years ago. At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there
were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never
know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent
of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine,
for money, for territory, and for revenge. Looking at distribution maps of
tigers then and now is like looking at maps of European Jewry before and
after World War II: you simply cannot believe your eyes. It is hard to
imagine such a thing is possible, especially when you consider that tigers
have accompanied our species throughout its entire history on the Asian
continent and have been embraced for their physical, aesthetic, and iconic
power. Because of its beauty, charisma, and mythic resonance, the tiger
has been adopted as a kind of totem animal worldwide. There is no other
creature that functions simultaneously as a poster child for the
conservation movement and as shorthand for power, sex, and danger.
Like a fist, or a cross, the tiger is a symbol we all understand.
Of the eight commonly recognized tiger subspecies, three of them—the
Balinese, the Javan, and the Caspian—have become extinct in the past
two generations, and a fourth, the South China tiger, has not been seen in
the wild since 1990. No reliable tiger sightings have been reported from
the Koreas since 1991. Today, the tiger has been reduced to isolated
pockets of relic populations scattered across the vast territory over which
it once roamed freely. Current estimates indicate a total wild population
of around 3,200 and falling.