Tigers are threatened with extinction. Until recently, men believed that habitat loss is the biggest threat for wild tigers, but now threat because of trade in tiger parts is found to be even bigger. In the last decades the demand for tiger parts grew massively.

General information

The tiger is the biggest felid and they will live upto around 14 years. The estimation was that in 1900 around 100.00 tigers lived in the wild in Asia.  Due to loss of habitat and hunting the tigers, nowadays around 3.900 tigers live in the wild. They have only 7% of living area left of the area they used to have.

Tiger Bones

Several parts of a tiger are used to produce medicines. You can for example think of nose leather, teeth, claws and meat, but the most important part of the tiger is their bones. Tiger bones are believed to have a healing effect in bone diseases. Bone disease is a common problem in China and when people have this bone diseases, they will experience a lot of pain. This is also a motivation for Chinese people to buy medicines with tiger bones, to reduce the pain.

Fun facts

• An advantage of the stripes tigers has, is that animals with a bad vision can barely see them in the long grass. The stripes also look like shadows and the contrasting colours are harder to see in the long grass.
• The vision of tigers at night is six times better than the human vision.
• Tigers are communicating with eachtother using their tails. The movement and position of the tail can give signals to other tigers.