9780718119911 / 0718119916

This book is a complete account of the life of the tiger in the wild, containing the fullest pictorial documentation of tigers ever assembled in a book. Guy Mountfort, a leading naturalist, explains how tigers live, hunt, mate and rear their young. Drawing on exciting new discoveries, he also explains how they mark their territories to avoid conflicts with neighboring tiers, how the individual bio-chemical "fingerprint" of the tiger was discovered, and how telemetry enabled scientists to follow the movements of tigers through the jungle. SAVING THE TIGER also tells the story of one of the greatest successes ever achieved in the field of wildlife conservation. In the course of only forty years the population of tigers had crashed from 100,000 to barely 5,000. To prevent their seemingly inevitable extinction Guy Mountfort initiated a crusade to save them. It was to become the greatest international effort ever made to save a single species from extinction. Guy Mountfort describes "Operation Tiger" in fascinating detail, explaining how the World Wildlife Fund persuaded a dozen Asian countries to institute conservation programmes and how reserves were created in which the tigers could live in safety.