Deadly poison threat to tigers

Poison is emerging as the latest and most dangerous threat to the survival of the last remaining wild tigers in Thailand.

OUTRAGEOUS!

Poachers targeting tigers for their valuable skins and body parts are turning to insecticide as an easy way to kill the iconic animals.

In what's regarded as Thailand's most important tiger sanctuary, wildlife rangers report mounting evidence of gangs setting traps with fresh meat, laced with poison, as bait.

In one particularly shocking incident, two tiger cubs were found close to death after eating the bait. By the time they had been discovered, it was too late to save them.

Rangers described the frustration of finding the cubs and seeing them in extreme pain but too far gone to be revived.

The two tiny animals had crawled into the bush to die so the poachers had failed to notice them. But they had evidently located the cubs' mother and made off with her body because no trace was seen of her.

For the rangers, it was a painful loss. As the superintendent of the sanctuary, Sompoch Maneerat, put it: "any time we see even one tiger killed, I feel a pain in my heart".

It really is painful to come across these acts against unprotected endangered species  living in the wild.

Fragile stronghold

Tigers are vulnerable because their numbers are already desperately low. In the Huai Kha Khang sanctuary, only 38 have been definitively identified, with statistical models suggesting that the actual total might be 53-65.

In the country as a whole, the best estimate is that no more than 200 tigers remain in the wild - a massive decline in the space of a few decades.

Huai Kha Khang is seen as the most viable tiger stronghold but even here their survival is highly fragile.

With prices soaring for the tigers' skins, genitals, bones and teeth, poaching gangs have become increasingly aggressive and well-organised, even mounting intelligence-gathering operations against the rangers to understand their patrol patterns.

From BBC Environment