HEADLINES:
R/€ Trackers lose sight of Putin's pet Siberian tiger
November 26, 2009 Edition 1
VLADIVOSTOK: A rare Siberian tiger fitted by Vladimir Putin with a radio-tracking collar has vanished, a Russian environmentalist said yesterday - dramatising the plight of a species some conservationists fear may be approaching extinction.
Russia's prime minister drew worldwide publicity last year when he shot the five-year-old female tiger with a tranquilliser gun and helped place a transmitter around her neck.
That allowed visitors to his website to follow the animal's prowlings through Russia's wild Far East. A video of the episode is on YouTube.
But the satellite tracking device has been silent since mid-September, which could be due to battery failure, a broken collar or poachers, Vladimir Krever of the WWF conservation organisation said.
Tigers are rapidly disappearing from the far-eastern regions of Russian due to poaching and the loss of habitat, conservationists say.
In fact, said the Wildlife Conservation Society in a report on Tuesday, their number might have declined by 40 percent since 1997.
However, the WWF, disputed the figure.
"It is absolutely incorrect. There has possibly been a decrease in the last two years, but definitely not 40 percent."
Krever said deep snow in the past two years had limited the tigers' ability to roam, making it harder to count them.
The New-York based Wildlife Conservation Society said only 56 tigers had been spotted in an area of 24 000km2 - about one-sixth of their known habitat in Russia. Based on that, the group estimated the total number remaining in the wild at 300.
A similar estimate in 2005 put the number left in Siberia at 500, a huge increase over the fewer than 30 thought to remain in the 1940s.
But the Wildlife Conservation Society said the latest count still showed the animals could face extinction.
The society recommends a greater effort to preserve the tiger's habitat, stronger legal protections and a crackdown on poachers who hunt the animals for hides and bones prized in traditional Chinese medicine.
Sergei Aramilev, of Russia's WWF, said Chinese poachers were attaching explosives covered with animal fat to branches. When tigers and endangered Amur leopards swallowed the bait, it explodes in their mouths.
Between 30 and 50 Amur tigers were killed every year. - Sapa-AP
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