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This is a very quick post but there will be more on the topic soon the upcoming WildTiger Journal, our first in a long time. Many of you would have seen the news of the new "tiger population statistic" of 3890, there's a link to it on a tweet at @WildTigerNews, posted yesterday. Anyone who follows my rants will know I am very wary of statistics but in actual fact the figure of around 4000 wild tigers has been talked about at ground level now for at least a couple of years, recognized as being possibly closer to the facts than the "fundraising figure" of 3200.
It's interesting that within moments of the announcement, in conjunction with the Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger currently being held in Delhi, the spin doctors from some of the big organizations (read expensive offices) were straight into their "we're doing a good job, donate now!" mode. Hardly surprising. My own conversations with people at the pointy end of things was more along the lines of don't buy into the bullshit.
As I say, more on this soon but personally there is a figure I bounce round a bit and that is there is maybe between 60,000 and 70,000 big cats left in the wild on our planet. Tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards are hard animals to count, census methodology is improving but it cannot be an exact science, it is impossible, nature is fluid and as I mentioned above there is always agendas attached to statistics. However whatever the purported numbers are there is still one undeniable fact, the most crucial one of all... and that is that big cats, like many wildlife species, are in a hell of a lot of trouble.
