Nations vow to double tiger numbers

MOSCOW – With the tiger on the verge of extinction, officials from 13 nations agreed Tuesday on a program to double the population of the big cat by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger by the Chinese zodiac.

The Tiger Summit, which brought together Russia and a dozen other Asian nations where tigers are still found in the wild, issued a statement declaring that the animal “is one of the most important indicators of health ecosystems” and promising to raise millions of dollars from governments and private organizations to do “everything possible to effectively manage, preserve, protect, and enhance (tiger) habitats.”

“Everybody understands full well that we are talking not just about a concrete representative of the live nature, a tiger, but we are talking about the state-level understanding with which we begin to address the environmental issues,” said Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The preservation program will help enhance the world’s tiger population, which is now estimated at 3,200, and increase Russia’s own number of tigers from 450 to more than 700.

“It is impossible to preserve these precious animals without preserving their habitats, which have been suffering from agricultural and industrial invasion in the last several decades,” said Amirkhan Amirkhanov, a senior official of the Russian Natural Resources Ministry.

Amirkhanov said poachers were killing between 20 and 30 tigers a year in Russia.