In the year 1900, there may have been as many or more than 100,000 tigers roaming this planet’s forests. And every year since then until now, that number has decreased. But a combination of better and broader monitoring techniques and, governments say, increased vigilance against poachers has led to the first increase in tiger numbers in over a century – to 3,890 this year. Some of the biggest increases were in India, which, in its latest tiger census, claimed a 30 percent population increase in the past four years to 2,226, almost three-quarters of the global total.
But ever since the numbers were released earlier in April, the scientific community has sought to dampen what it has seen as the Indian government’s self-congratulation. “All of this tom-tomming and arm-waving, claiming we’ve had stupendous success, is ridiculous and unscientific,” tiger expert K. Ullas Karanth, science director for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Asia, told the Associated Press.
The steep growth figure is widely seen as implausible. Tiger populations may be experiencing a small rebound from historic lows, but a good deal of the increase is surely attributable to simply missing fewer animals in their counting, experts say.
“I’d prefer to say there are 30 percent more known tigers rather than say there is actually an increase in tigers. We might not have counted them all earlier,” Anurag Danda of the World Wildlife Fund, one of many groups that participated in the census, told the AP.
