Home InitiativesCATTTiger Farming Geoff Ward Response

Tigers cannot be reintroduced to the wild

To the Editor:

Barun Mitra (Sell the Tiger to Save It, NYT August 15, 2006) seems to know remarkably little about the animals he claims commercial farming would save from extinction. Caged tigers are not endangered. Wild tigers are. By encouraging people to think of them as mere ³products,² not free-roaming predators, he can only help accelerate their disappearance at the hands of impoverished local people desperate to cash in.

There is also precious little evidence that zoo- or farm-bred big cats can ever be reintroduced successfully into the wild, and a good deal of data suggesting that predators that become accustomed to humans in infancy are far more likely, if released, to attack domestic livestock -- and the men and women and children who herd them -- than are their forest-bred counterparts.

Throughout what little is left of its range across Asia, the tiger and the forests in which it lives are already in desperate trouble. Turning the tiger into nothing more than a commodity to be harvested could finally spell the doom of both.

Geoffrey C. Ward
New York, August 15, 2006
(Geoffrey C. Ward is the co-author of two books on tiger conservation,
Tiger-Wallahs and The Year of the Tiger.)