averages recorded over the previous decade—has been attributed to
several factors, but chief among them is poaching. Even though the fine
for killing a tiger in Russia is severe—approximately $20,000—the
vicissitudes of Russian law make it nearly impossible to convict tiger
poachers. In order to succeed in court, one must be able to produce a dead
tiger, a suspect, and two witnesses—a hard combination to come by in the
deep forest. Some of the details may differ, but in terms of the collective
impact on Amur tigers, it is the early ’90s all over again.
While Inspection Tiger and its sister agencies have been “reorganized,”
disempowered, and starved for funding over the past decade, the
responsibility for wildlife protection in Primorye has been shifted from
the federal government to the territory. The territorial government has, in
turn, handed this job to the Committee for Hunting Management, which
oversees sixty thousand registered hunters. The results are analogous to
privatization: a job requiring objective oversight has been given to an
entity with conflicting interests. Hunting managers don’t, as a rule, like
tigers very much because a single tiger can kill scores of deer, boar, or
elk in a year, thus depriving hunters of game they feel is rightfully theirs.
Add to this the fact that, since 2000, the number of active wardens in
Primorye has been slashed and slashed again to the point that one warden
may be responsible for overseeing thousands of square miles of forest,
and the new data, though inconclusive, begin to make more sense.
As of this writing (December 2009), fewer than four hundred tigers
may remain in the Russian Far East. Elsewhere in Asia, tiger populations
continue to slip as well. If the tiger is permitted to go extinct in the wild,
it would be the largest carnivore to do so since the American lion
(Panthera leo atrox) died out at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately
ten thousand years ago. The extinction of the American lion happened to
coincide with the dawn of our current era, which some scientists have
taken to calling the Anthropocene. It is characterized by increasingly
dense concentrations of human beings living in permanent settlements on
a landscape that has been progressively altered and degraded in order to
support our steadily growing population.
The difference between the extinctions at the close of the Pleistocene
ron
(Ron)
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