Plain and simple, Tigers are awesome. Unfortunately, being as awesome as they are, they are also sought after by poachers. Add to that, they also have to deal with the fact that humans have pushed most tigers out of their natural habitat. Currently, the Bengal Tiger (those pictured in this post) have dropped to numbers hovering around 4,000, most of which are kept in captivity.
"In India, where about 60 per cent of the world's wild tigers still roam, the human population has grown by 50 percent in the past 20 years. Over the past 40 years, China's population, the largest in the world, has more than doubled; and 99 per cent of China's original forest habitat has been destroyed.
In order to live in the wild, tigers need water to drink, animals to hunt, and vegetation in which to hide. As the mountains, jungles, forests, and long grasses that have long been home to tigers disappear, so, too, do tigers."
Unfortunately, tigers are not a special case here. Countless species are on the verge of extinction due to the negligent expansion of human civilizations. What is going to have to happen for us to have to get it in through our thick skulls that our planet will not continue to sustain our current mode of growth? The fact that we (in terms of earth's evolotuion) in a very short amount of time have the ability to nearly eliminate entire species of animals that have roamed the earth for millions of years is incredibly frightening.
Anyhow, here are some awesome pictures of Bengal Tigers take by The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (T.I.G.E.R.S) in an effort to raise awareness.
You can visit them here: http://www.tigerfriends.com/RSF.html
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