[CAT] "Vladimir Putin Really Loves Tigers — And It's Actually Making a Difference in the World"

[rfmcdonald]

Laura Dattaro of Vice reports on the resurgence of the Amur tiger in the Russian Far East, a consequence of sustained support from the highest levels of the Russian state for conservation policies.

A recent census found as many as 540 Amur tigers living in Russia's eastern forests, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). That's an improvement over the last count, in 2005, which found between 423 and 502 of the tigers. In the 1940s, their numbers were no more than 40.

"It seems to have increased quite significantly, and that's extremely encouraging," Barney Long, director of species conservation for the WWF, told VICE News. "The fact that [the Russians] can sustain that over such a large area over time is what's really impressive."

Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers, are the largest tiger subspecies in the world. They also live farther north than any other tiger, historically inhabiting Russia, northeast China, the Korean Peninsula, and northeast Mongolia.

But due to poaching and habitat loss, they're now confined almost entirely to Russia's Far East, where the few remaining tigers roam a vast area of nearly 700,000 square miles, about the size of Alaska. Legal hunting in the 19th century drove their numbers down so badly that by the end of the 1930s, when a Russian biologist conducted the first survey of the species, less than 30 of them remained on the planet, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

Russia has had strict anti-poaching measures in place for at least the last two decades, Long said, and has taken additional measures in recent years to create new parks and protect the tigers' prey animals. In 2010, the country banned logging of the Korean pine, which provides food for the deer and boar that tigers rely on to survive the harsh winter months.