As China prepares to usher in the Year of the Tiger next week, a massive publicity drive has begun in neighboring India, where the big cat is the national animal, to save it from extinction.
Conservation group WWF-India has enlisted the support of sports stars and celebrities to raise awareness of the threat, citing government estimates that there are just over 1,400 tigers left in the wild.
The campaign was launched at the end of last month and has so far seen more than 75,000 people pledge their support on www.saveourtigers.com.
PHOTO: AFP
“Stripey,” a cute tiger cub who features in the print, online and television advertisements, also has more than 70,000 fans on the Internet social networking site Facebook and over 2,500 followers on micro-blogging site Twitter.
“Just 1,411 left. You can make a difference,” the ad says, urging people to lobby politicians to do more to protect the animal.
Diwakar Sharma, associate director for species conservation at WWF-India, said they had been delighted with the response which they hoped would push the issue up the political agenda.
“Public opinion is a must for this,” he said. “Public-private partnership can change things ... What we can do is try to influence this public opinion.”
The tiger holds a special place for Indians and has become an icon of the country’s cultural and natural heritage. But despite conservation efforts over a number of years, Sharma said the situation was now “critical.”
WWF-India has been working since 1973 to protect tigers, leading to the creation of special reserves and protected areas in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
The global wild tiger population is thought to be at an all-time low of 3,200, down from about 20,000 in the 1980s.
As elsewhere across Southeast Asia, tiger numbers are threatened by population growth, with a loss of natural habitat to agriculture and available prey leading them to encroach on human settlements in search of food.
A British-based organization, the Environmental Investigation Agency, said last year China was turning a blind eye to the illegal trade in tiger parts and pelts. Many of the body parts used for their supposed medicinal properties and as aphrodisiacs, are smuggled to China from India via Nepal. New Delhi recently asked Beijing for its help to control trafficking but no official agreement was reached.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS