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Rare Three-Legged Tiger Captured on CameraHe escaped from a snare, losing a paw |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
9th of July 2007, 09:21 GMT
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This animal has rarely been captured by a camera in the wilderness. And one of the few images of the endangered Sumatran tiger presents an individual which has lost one of its paws. This is probably due to a snare, in which the animal lost its leg.
The Sumatran tigers are the smallest tiger race nowadays: the males can reach a maximum of 136 kg (300 pounds), being just twice bigger than a leopard. The females are smaller. The Sumatran tiger is in great danger of extinction due to illegal poaching and a shrinking habitat, due to agriculture and logging and
there are less than 400 left in the world.
The animal was photographed twice with a camera trap, once in March and again in May, in the forests of the Tesso Nilo national park on Sumatra island.
"A total of four photographs, taken in March and May of this year inside Tesso Nilo National Park in central Sumatra, show the male tiger that appears to be in good physical condition other than the missing paw. The lower half of his right front leg is missing. We suspect it to be the same tiger who reportedly was caught in a snare in November last year, but cut its paw off to escape, leaving that part of the leg in the scene," Sunarto, a tiger biologist with WWF, told Reuters.
Tesso Nilo is one of the 45 national parks in Indonesia, one of the few countries in the world which still has significant swathes of tropical rainforests.
"Snares represent a big threat to tigers and elephants in the national park. Together with the government's conservation agency we have confiscated over 100 snares, and most of them were placed inside the protected areas of the national park. 23 of the snares were found to specifically target tigers, the rest were used for animals such as wild boar, muntjac and sambar deer," said Sunarto.
"Aside from illegal hunting and poaching, the tiny populations of rare tigers and elephants in the protected area of 38,576 hectares (96,400 acres) are also threatened by land clearance for small-holder palm oil plantations and agriculture. Only a dozen adult tigers are estimated to live in this park. If we don't stop this, they will soon be gone." he added.
The antipoaching campaigns try many methods to make people stop employing snares and to educate them on the risks of such practices.
"The use of snares is not only threatening the remaining tiger population, it also leads to a bigger problem: human-tiger conflict. When a tiger is sick or crippled, its ability to hunt and catch natural prey is reduced significantly. As a result, such tigers search for food in nearby villages, attacking livestock or even people." he signaled.
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