The Great Honor Of The Hundred Acre Woods - 1711 Words

From the ancient ceremonies of China to the Hundred Acre Woods, tigers have had iconic roles in cultures around the world. They symbolize strength, energy, and wealth, and to be associated with one – whether through birth signs or personality traits – is a great honor. Their time on Earth, however, may one day come to an end, and they will be reduced to legends and storybook characters unless we do something to help them. Tigers are beautiful, powerful, and majestic creatures that are being wiped out by humans. If they’re not dying from habitat loss, they’re being hunted for their fur and bones to make fancy clothes and traditional medicines that can be easily replaced with aspirin. We humans act as though our higher intelligence gives us†¦show more content†¦Tigers can eat about 88 pounds of meat at one time and will hunt every eight or nine days. They are not house cats. They are strong, smart, and independent animals that need the respect they are due. Historically, there have been nine subspecies of tigers. Three have become extinct in the last century: the Bali tiger, the Caspian tiger, and the Javan tiger. One subspecies, the South China tiger, is on the top ten list of endangered species list and is projected to disappear in the next ten years. The remaining five subspecies are the Siberian, Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, and Sumatran tigers. Including all the subspecies, there are fewer than 3,200 wild tigers left in the world. Each of these subspecies inhabits a specific geographical location; the disappearance of a subspecies means the disappearance of tigers in an entire area. For example, when the Caspian tiger, which lived in the Middle East from around the Caspian Sea through Kazakhstan, was declared extinct in the 1970s, tigers weren’t to be found farther west than India. The loss of a subspecies is a very big deal for the ecosystems they occupied. There are two main reasons for the endangerment of tigers. The first reason is poaching. Tigers are often hunted for their fur to make clothing and fashion accessories in both Asian and Western countries. Some traditional Tibetan robes