This article contains promotional content .(December 2009) |
Abbreviation | SCT |
---|---|
Formation | 2000 |
Founder | Li Quan |
Purpose | Tiger conversation |
Key people | Stuart Bray Brad Nilson [1] Kun (Michael) Shang Heinrich Funck |
Website | www |
Save China's Tigers (SCT) is an international charitable foundation based in Hong Kong, the United States, and the United Kingdom (headquartered in London) that aims to save the big cats of China from extinction. It focuses on the Chinese tigers (South China tigers). It also has other branches in Mainland China and South Africa.
The organization's primary objective is to raise awareness regarding the vulnerability of the Chinese Tiger, while advocating for its protection and preservation. This mission is pursued through public education, the introduction of advanced conservation models, and experimentation with these models both within China and internationally. Additionally, the organization seeks to secure funding to support these conservation initiatives. Another aim is to act as a liaison for all those organizations concerned with the conservation of China's wildlife, sustainable development, biodiversity, and habitat. The organization's goal is to reverse the fate of the South China tiger from the brink of extinction by taking them out of zoos, breeding them, letting them regain their hunting abilities, and reintroducing them back into the wild.[ citation needed ]
"Save China's Tigers" is a conservation organization founded in 2000 by Li Quan. Li Quan's then-husband, Stuart Bray, who had previously worked as an executive at Deutsche Bank, played a crucial role in providing financial support for the organization during its early stages.[ citation needed ]
The word "rewilding" was coined by conservationist and activist Dave Foreman, [2] first occurring in print in 1990. [3] The concept was further defined and expanded by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss in a paper published in 1998. [4] According to Soulé and Noss, rewilding is a conservation method based on "cores, corridors, and carnivores." [5]
In order to be successfully reintroduced into a wild environment, tigers must know how to hunt prey and have to be able to defend themselves. Once in captivity, an animal will gradually lose its ability to survive in the wild, and will likely die if released.[ citation needed ] Thus, Save China's Tigers started a rehabilitation program to help captive tigers regain their survival skills. [6] (subscription required) Rehabilitation steps taken by the project include feeding the tigers with carcasses of small game. Once the tigers are eating the new food items, live animals similar to those taken dead will be occasionally introduced into large hunting camps. The SPCA claimed that this process was cruel to the prey, but the South African courts refused to issue an interdict. [7]
The Laohu Valley Reserve (LVR) is a roughly 350 square kilometer private reserve near Philippolis in the Free State. [8] It has been created with the aims of rewilding captive-born South China tigers and for South African biodiversity conservation in general. LVR was created in 2002 out of 17 defunct sheep farms, [9] [10] [11] and efforts to return the overgrazed land to natural status are ongoing. The South China tigers at LVR for rewilding are kept confined to a tiger-proof camp complex of roughly 1.8 square kilometers, with other areas of the reserve being used to protect native South African species. The word "laohu" is a Chinese term for tiger. [12]
In April 2014 Madonna gave birth to three cubs, two females and one male. The father of the cubs is Tigerwoods. [13]
On 20 November 2015, two South China tiger cubs were born at Laohu Valley. The mother is Cathay and the father is King Henry. The birth of these cubs brought the number of South China tigers within the care of Save China's Tigers in the Laohu Valley Reserve to twenty. At the time, this represented more than 20% of the world population of the world's most critically endangered tiger. [14] However, in February 2016, one of the two cubs died, leaving nineteen South China tigers in the reserve. [15]
A difficulty faced by the project is the limited gene pool for South China tigers – all the South China tigers in Chinese zoos are descended from only six individuals caught in the 1950s. [16]
The WWF says that the money is being spent in the wrong place and that the Amur tiger has a stronger chance of survival over these tigers. [17] [18]
Li accused her former husband, Stuart Bray, of using charitable funds for personal expenses. [19] This was reported in the Daily Mail , which damaged the charity's reputation with the public. However, Stuart Bray was acquitted of misappropriation of charitable funds in a court case decision in October 2014. [19]
The Bengal tiger or Royal Bengal tiger is a population of the Panthera tigris tigris subspecies and the nominate tiger subspecies. It ranks among the biggest wild cats alive today. It is estimated to have been present in the Indian subcontinent since the Late Pleistocene for about 12,000 to 16,500 years. Its historical range covered the Indus River valley until the early 19th century, almost all of India, western Pakistan, southern Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and southwestern China. Today, it inhabits India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and southwestern China. It is threatened by poaching, habitat loss and habitat fragmentation.
Habitat conservation is a management practice that seeks to conserve, protect and restore habitats and prevent species extinction, fragmentation or reduction in range. It is a priority of many groups that cannot be easily characterized in terms of any one ideology.
The Free State, formerly known as the Orange Free State, is a province of South Africa. Its capital is Bloemfontein, which is also South Africa's judicial capital. Its historical origins lie in the Boer republic called the Orange Free State and later the Orange Free State Province.
Species reintroduction is the deliberate release of a species into the wild, from captivity or other areas where the organism is capable of survival. The goal of species reintroduction is to establish a healthy, genetically diverse, self-sustaining population to an area where it has been extirpated, or to augment an existing population. Species that may be eligible for reintroduction are typically threatened or endangered in the wild. However, reintroduction of a species can also be for pest control; for example, wolves being reintroduced to a wild area to curb an overpopulation of deer. Because reintroduction may involve returning native species to localities where they had been extirpated, some prefer the term "reestablishment".
The South China tiger is a population of the Panthera tigris tigris subspecies that is native to southern China. The population mainly inhabited the Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces. It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the China's Red List of Vertebrates and is possibly extinct in the wild since no wild individual has been recorded since the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, continued survival was considered unlikely because of low prey density, widespread habitat degradation and fragmentation, and other environmental issues in China. In the fur trade, it used to be called Amoy tiger.
The Arabian leopard is the smallest leopard subspecies. It was described in 1830 and is native to the Arabian Peninsula, where it was widely distributed in rugged hilly and montane terrain until the late 1970s. Today, the population is severely fragmented and thought to decline continuously. In 2008, an estimated 45–200 individuals in three isolated subpopulations were restricted to western Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen. However, as of 2023, it is estimated that 100–120 in total remain, with 70-84 mature individuals, in Oman and Yemen, and it is possibly extinct in Saudi Arabia. The current population trend is suspected to be decreasing.
John Varty is a South African wildlife filmmaker who has made more than 30 documentaries and one feature film. Varty is also leading a controversial project which aims to create a free-ranging, self-sustaining tiger population outside of Asia.
The Aspinall Foundation is a British charity which works to promote wildlife conservation. It was set up by casino owner John Aspinall in 1984 and runs the two zoos he established, Port Lympne Wild Animal Park and Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent, England. It also runs conservation projects overseas to protect endangered species and return captive animals back to the wild. The charity is now run by Damian Aspinall, son of the founder.
Pleistocene rewilding is the advocacy of the reintroduction of extant Pleistocene megafauna, or the close ecological equivalents of extinct megafauna. It is an extension of the conservation practice of rewilding, which aims to restore functioning, self-sustaining ecosystems through practices that may include species reintroductions.
Tiger conservation attempts to prevent tigers from becoming extinct and preserving its natural habitat. This is one of the main objectives of the international animal conservation community. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has played a crucial role in improving international efforts for tiger conservation.
Lola ya Bonobo is the world's only sanctuary for orphaned bonobos. Originally founded by Claudine André in 1994, since 2002 the sanctuary has been located just south of the suburb of Kimwenza at the Petites Chutes de la Lukaya, Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions.
The Northeast African cheetah is a cheetah subspecies occurring in Northeast Africa. Contemporary records are known in South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, but population status in Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan is unknown.
The Southeast African cheetah is the nominate cheetah subspecies native to East and Southern Africa. The Southern African cheetah lives mainly in the lowland areas and deserts of the Kalahari, the savannahs of Okavango Delta, and the grasslands of the Transvaal region in South Africa. In Namibia, cheetahs are mostly found in farmlands. In India, four cheetahs of the subspecies are living in Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh after having been introduced there.
The Laohu Valley Reserve (LVR) is a nature reserve located near Philippolis in the Free State and near Vanderkloof Dam in the Northern Cape of South Africa. It is a roughly 350-square-kilometre private reserve.
Li Quan is a Beijing-born wildlife conservationist who lives in London.
The Siberian Tiger Introduction Project involves reestablishing populations of the Siberian tiger, also known as the Amur tiger, in their former range and also expanding their range by introducing them as replacements of their genetically similar relative, the extinct Caspian tiger, which inhabited Central and Western Asia. Currently, the Siberian tiger inhabits the cold mountains of the Russian Far East and northern China.
Rewilding Europe is a non-profit organization based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, dedicated to creating rewilded landscapes throughout Europe. The group's efforts have contributed to increasing the stock of previously endangered species such as the European bison and the Iberian lynx.
Reed F. Noss, a conservation biologist since the beginning of the field in the early 1980s, is a writer, photographer, and speaker. He retired in 2017 as Provost's Distinguished Research Professor, Pegasus Professor, and Davis-Shine Professor at the University of Central Florida. He is President and Chief Scientist for the Florida Institute for Conservation Science, Chief Science Advisor for the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative, and Chief Science Advisor for the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance. Noss' published work consists of over 350 published or in press scientific articles, book chapters, and major reports and eight published books, with another book in preparation.
Iberá National Park is a national park in Argentina located in the northeast province of Corrientes. The national park adjoins the 5,530 km2 Iberá Provincial Park to the southeast. The national park and provincial park are both within the Iberá Provincial Nature Reserve, a conservation area of 13,245 km2 created in 1982. The combined protected area is the largest in Argentina.