One solution to extinction: bring Chinese tigers to Africa
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The Times’ Robyn Dixon shares the story of one of the last surviving South China tigers, a glossy-coated male known only as 327, and the controversial plan by a former fashion executive to bring them back from the brink of extinction by moving them to South Africa.
Some would see 327 as proof that trying to save the world’s most endangered tiger and re-establish wild hunting populations is a hopeless case.But not Li Quan, a Beijing-born former fashion executive with a dream so large that many tiger conservationists ridicule her. She and her husband, American investment banker Stuart Bray, are trying to drag the species, almost wiped out in a ‘pest eradication’ campaign by the government of Mao Tse-tung, back from the brink of extinction.Quan’s plan goes like this: China lacks conservation expertise and habitat with adequate prey, so five of the remaining 60 to 70 Chinese zoo tigers have been sent to South Africa, which has both, to breed and learn to hunt in bush enclosures. The move buys time and builds numbers while the Chinese government restores the habitat for a tiger reserve in China by moving people out and bringing game in.Conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund deride the project as foolish, unscientific and a waste of money. LA TIMES
Read Dixon’s report and check out the photo gallery.
--Tony Barboza