But thanks to my association with the Vasantha Youth Lodge of Theosophical society i had the privilege of watching a special screening of "Truth about Tigers" a movie by Shekar Dattatri the eminent wild life photographer which focussed on how important it is to conserve the tigers.
The essence of it we have to understand is that the Tigers have existed on Earth even before Humans came, if we believe the Evolutionary theory and its a shame that our national animal needs to depend on our intervention for its survival.
The fact remains that when we are bloating of being an emerging economic superpower it will be a huge vacuum if we become cynical and throw our hands saying we are hopeless in saving our national animal. The tiger has been pushed from the free roaming forests all out India to just 1% land and even here we humans still fight for space with the tigers which for a fact can live in any sort of forests. The current forest coverage is low but research experts its still enough for close 10,000 tigers to survive in the wild.
The truth which should astound environmental conservatives is that a healthy tiger population is a clear indication of a healthy vegetation this is because the tiger is the apex hunter and thus when there is healthy tiger population it shows that there are good herbivores and thus a good vegetation which will help in fighting global warming. With illegal demand of tiger products to China never seems to decrease every part of it is wanted including the Whiskers which are used for tooth ache.
The reality is that Tigers die when they do not have proper food, a tiger needs approximately a prey per week and thus for every 5o deers that are hunted we lose a tiger as it starves without food. We have celebrities going on dear hunting escapades and mostly even the courts let off people saying its only a dear and charges them a meager amount of fine but this compounds and has put this grave situation. We can replicate a good system which was used in the Bhadra forests of Karnataka where the government offered 1 million Indian rupees to any family which is ready to move out of the forest and thus the tiger count in that forest has remained steady unlike the famed forests of Sariska, Panna and Ranthambore where we have lost the tigers because of
(i) Faulty methods to count them
(ii) Poorly trained rangers
(iii) Denying gtruths given by experts
(iv) The greed of the poachers
The major activity which we as common people could do is press the issue a call to all lawyers please if you can take up cases of NGO's and fight as the ratio of poachers caught to sentenced for crimes is less than 5 % thanks to lack of good legal support. An urge to use recycled paper which will save forests and finally let us stop living in Ignorance that government will do anything we need another revival like project tiger or else we could better start looking for a new national animal
And please visit this link if you are interested about tiger conservation and feel something should be done for the national animal
"The Truth About Tigers"
Cheers
Arvind !!
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