Your Zoo Around the World
Living Large: Can Big Cats and Plain Folks Get Along?
Whenever people and large carnivores coexist, conflicts between the two often occur. The Siberian tigers living in the Russian Far East are no exception. Many of these tigers live near villages and have been known to attack livestock and people. When this occurs, the villagers often retaliate by killing the tigers in the area.
These deaths can be an important mortality factor for small populations of endangered species such as the Siberian tiger. With less than 400 individuals in the wild, the Siberian tiger is second only to the South China tiger as the most endangered tiger subspecies. Until recently, officials generally dealt with problem tigers in Russia by killing the tiger or doing nothing. The former often resulted in unnecessary tiger deaths, while the latter resulted in poor public attitudes toward tiger conservation.
Establishing Trained Response Teams
In 1999, the Primorski Krai Committee for Natural Resources officially created a special department, Inspection Tiger, to conduct anti-poaching activities and address and resolve the problems between humans and tigers. Inspection Tiger created a sub-group, the Tiger Response Team, to address tiger-human conflict situations. The Tiger Response Team works cooperatively with the Wildlife Conservation Society's Siberian Tiger Project to resolve conflict situations. As a result, an official statement for reacting to a potential human-tiger conflict and a protocol for dealing with problem tigers has been developed.
Tigers involved in tiger-human conflicts are often injured or diseased and require diagnosis and treatment. The Tiger Response Team is equipped to capture sick animals that sometimes wander into towns and to rescue and rehabilitate tigers injured in poacher's snares. There is no other Tiger Response Team in the world as effective as the cooperative effort between the Wildlife Conservation Society and Inspection Tiger. This initiative involves a highly trained staff that knows how to capture, immobilize and relocate tigers. The goals of the Tiger Response Team include:
The Columbus Zoo has provided support to the Tiger Response Team since 2006.
For more information on the Zoo's conservation efforts go to www.columbuszoo.org
