By no means as publicized or insidious, but much more problematic than poaching, are habitat loss and fragmentation. Without a safe and healthy home for tigers and their prey, neither can survive in the wild. Humans are rapidly encroaching into wilderness areas that were once ruled exclusively by the tiger. For example in India, which is home to over one third of the world's wild tigers, the human population has exceeded one billion inhabitants, a number that many estimate could double in the next three decades if the current rate of growth continues. Asia, which was once covered with vast forests, and where at the turn of the last century more than 100,000 tigers lived, is amazingly now home to more than half of humanity. There is no question that incessant population growth is steadily eliminating the tiger and the forest ecosystems it is dependent upon.

Please support The Tiger Foundation's effort to protect some of the last tiger strongholds of Asia.

Wild tigers may now number as few as 5000, and live in small islands of forest surrounded by a sea of humanity. To survive in the wild, tigers need water, prey and healthy forests. Nevertheless, Asian forest cover has declined by more than eighty percent in the past few centuries, and what remains exists as small fragments under heavy human pressure. Furthermore, water and air pollution are making some tiger habitats unlivable. Even worse, in some regions, tigers and humans compete for the same prey, to the point where not enough prey remains to sustain the tiger population. Human settlement, as well as industrial and agricultural expansion is forcing tigers to retreat into shrinking tracts of land. As the resources that sustain tigers disappear, so too, do the tigers. Currently, there are only a handful of forests in Asia that contain populations of more than 100 tigers.

Moreover, as human activity envelops these shrinking forests, population fragmentation occurs, a circumstance whereby tigers in one area can no longer breed with tigers in adjacent areas because villages, farms, roads, dams, fences and industry have separated them from one another. Inevitably, tigers are forced to repeatedly interbreed with the same small group of animals, eventually weakening the gene pool and leading to reproductive problems, birth defects and mutations. As a result of habitat loss and fragmentation, most tigers now barely survive in tiny isolated and genetically unsustainable populations.

Save a Tiger. Save a Forest.

In order to save wild tigers, we must save their prey. In order to save the tiger's prey, we must save the forest in which they live. By saving tigers, we are saving the last forests of Asia.


It is indeed difficult to imagine that the animal we call Panthera tigris, an animal that has walked the earth for more than one million years, has been almost wiped out in the past one hundred years. This is a truly astonishing circumstance, alarming in its implication: The proliferation of mankind, inexorable in its rapidity, has all but decimated the wild tiger population in one short century. Surely it is therefore up to mankind to undo the damage and save this magnificent animal for future generations to appreciate and revere. Surely it is up to each one of us.

As anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."