Wild tigers to reappear in Kazakhstan after70 years8 September 2017

The WWF is providing $10 million (8.3 million euros) forthe project to reintroduce Amur tiger into Kazakhstan

Wild tigers could be returning to Kazakhstan after agroundbreaking reintroduction plan was signed offFriday.

Seven decades since poaching and habitatdestruction wiped out indigenous stocks of thegiant cats, it is hoped they will once again roamfree—but experts said it will take years.

The Central Asian country's agreement with theWorld Wildlife Fund requires it to graduallyintegrate Amur tigers, closely related to the extinctCaspian tiger, that disappeared from itssoutheastern Ili-Balkhash region in the mid-20th century.

The fund is providing $10 million (8.3 million euros)for the project that will see Kazakhstan become thefirst country to reintroduce a population of largecats back into a territory following an extinction.

WWF's Russian representative Igor Chestin hailedthe signing as a "event of global significance" butwarned reintroducing tigers into the country will

take "years".

"It will be years before tigers appear on this territorybecause the territory needs to be speciallyprepared," Chestin said at a press conference inthe Kazakh capital Astana.

Kazakh Agriculture Minister Askar Myrzakhmetovsaid work on a specially protected natural area forthe tigers would start at the beginning of next year.

"In fact, we are talking about restoring a wholeecosystem, where this species is set to bereintroduced," Myrzakhmetov said at the pressconference.

According to a scientific article on the introduction,co-authored by the WWF's Chestin, Caspian tigersinhabited a range taking in 13 modern-daycountries with Turkey and China at its extremes justprior to the turn of the century.

The Soviet Union sped up the animal's extinctionwith mass irrigation and agricultural developmentthat cut into the partly wooded habitat it inhabitedalong with its prey, mainly boar and deer.

Bounty hunting was also rife in the early Sovietperiod.

The Caspian tiger is generally thought to havebecome extinct globally in the mid to late 20thcentury.

Numbers of wild tigers as a whole have dwindledprecipitously over the last century, plunging from100,000 to fewer than 4,000 across a dozencountries today.

In 2016 tigers were declared "functionally extinct"by the WWF in Cambodia, with the last big cat seenon a camera trap there in 2007.

1 / 2

© 2017 AFPAPA citation: Wild tigers to reappear in Kazakhstan after 70 years (2017, September 8) retrieved 17 July2018 from https://phys.org/news/2017-09-wild-tigers-reappear-kazakhstan-years.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, nopart may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

2 / 2