14 DAY TRIAL // Apart from having to deal with habitat loss and poachers, the world's remaining tigers now have their paws full with yet another threat to their long-term survival: dogs.
Reports issued by conservationists say that, throughout the past few years, a disease previously documented as confined to dogs has been undergoing several mutations that might allow it to affect not just canines, but other animals as well.
Some of the animals which greenheads fear will soon experience a drop in their population because of the canine distemper virus (CDV, for short) are seals, raccoons, hyenas and big cats, Live Science reports.
By the looks of it, it was back in the 1990s when wildlife researchers first became aware of the fact that this virus no longer targeted dogs alone.
At that time, they found that some 30% of lions living in the Serengeti, Africa, had been infected with the virus and had passed away because of it.
They say that the felines most likely got the virus from dogs living in the human communities close to their natural habitats.
The same source informs us that the CDV can easily spread through air. Once it infects an animal, it toys with its central nervous system and makes it behave in peculiar and unnatural ways.
Researchers suspect that at least some of the big cats that, back in the mid-1990s, started walking into villages and acting as if fearing humans were the last thing on their minds only did so because they had been infected with said virus.
Presently, the only good news is that, although the disease triggered by the canine distemper virus is not very easy to treat, infections can be prevented with the help of vaccines.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, some 3,200 tigers are left to roam the wild these days. Their current population is a mere 5% of what it used to be just a century ago, the organization says.
Besides experiencing this dramatic drop in their overall headcount, tigers have also lost about 60% of their natural habitats, and keep losing more as the weeks go by.