IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Gittleman, J.L. | |
| Review: Riding the Tiger: Tiger conservation in human-dominated landscapes | |
| 2000 Animal Conservation (3) | |
After a dense, fact filled text of over 350m pages, I found it more than ironic that the final offereing in this volume is a little Appendix on "Counting tigers, with confidence". It struck me that if we do not know what we are saying, conversation is indeed a crisis science - it fails even to have a clear subject of study. However, this simple concluding note was both reassuring and symbolic. Reassuring, because it would be very easy for the severe scientific complexities involved in saving tigers (Panthera tigris), particularly in the age of sophisticated telemetry and GIS data retrieval programs, to allow us to lose sight of the animal itself. The editors have done a masterful job of ensuring that the biology of tigers lies at the heart of each and every conservation decision, even those that now rest with government authorities. More importantly, though the difficulty of identifying tigers is symbolic for how tough it is to save this animal: theoretical approaches, field methods, and governmental treaties all must interlace for tigers to survive. This book nicely summarizes just how complex the problem of tiger conservation really is; it also presents compelling reasons for devoting significant energies to saving a single species while facing the demise of animals that might be saved more easily and less expensively. The volume is structured in three parts. Correctly, the first begins with a review of what factors are generally involved in saving the largest terrestrial carnivore in Asia. Ecologically, the problem is in understanding the influence of critical factors that on the one hand restrict their prey to a few ungulate species but on the other affords them the flexibility to live in tropical rainforests (Indonesia), seasonally dry evergreen forests (India), and temperate forests (east to Vietnam and north to Russia) |
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