Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made headlines by championing the endangered Siberian tiger — posing with a cuddly cub and placing a tracking collar on a full-grown female in the wilds of his country's Far East. Now Russia is helping plan an ambitious program that it hopes can double the global tiger population by 2022.
The government hopes to hold a "tiger summit" in the Far East city of Vladivostok in September to coordinate multinational efforts to protect the Amur tiger, its habitats and increasingly scarce food sources, representatives of the Natural Resources Ministry, the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund said Wednesday.
"We decided that this time we should do something serious in order to preserve tigers on our planet," said Igor Chestin, director of the Russian branch of the World Wildlife Fund. "The situation is catastrophic."
The meeting would be hosted by Putin and would include leaders of countries such as India and China, according to Chestin and Deputy Natural Resources Minister Igor Maidanov.
The goal of the program, which could involve as many as 13 countries, would be to double the current number of tigers worldwide to some 6,500 by 2022. Chestin said this would require a total $1 billion from all participating countries — a target he said could be met with both government funds and private sponsorship.
Putin's support, which Maidanov said was expected, would likely give the effort a major boost.
Last year, Putin was given an Amur cub on his birthday and showed it off to journalists inside his home before putting it in other hands. Months earlier, Russian television networks showed him patting a grown female on the cheek after shooting it with a tranquilizer gun as part of a program to track the rare cats on a Russian wildlife preserve.
His web site contains a section dedicated to the protection of the Amur tiger, also known as the Siberian or Ussuri tiger, and one page tracks the movements of the tiger he shot as it prowls around the Far East.
Hunters kill tigers for their prized pelts and body parts, some of which are used in traditional Chinese medicines, while logging and housing developments have encroached on tiger habitats.
Funds raised in the program would be used to improve these habitats by providing more park rangers and protecting deer and boar that the tigers hunt for food.
Chestin said in most countries where the tigers live, conditions for survival are "extremely unfavorable," though the situation in Russia — where some 450 adult Amur tigers live in the Far East — has stabilized in recent years. Still, WWF-Russia estimates that up to 50 Amur tigers are killed every year.