Cambodia is trying to bring four tigers from India to increase its tiger population. Last year, India had signed an agreement with Cambodia. Under this agreement, India has started paying attention to the technology and preparations for sending its tigers to Cambodia.
Under this agreement, Cambodia hopes that it will get help in importing four tigers from India. Its aim is to revive the tiger population in Cambodia.
Cambodia’s dry forests were once home to large numbers of Indochinese tigers, but conservationists say rampant poaching of tigers and their prey has decimated their numbers.
Tigers in Cambodia were last seen through a camera trap in 2007 and the government declared tigers extinct in Cambodia in 2016.
Khwe Atitya, a spokesman for Cambodia’s environment ministry, told AFP news agency that one male and three females could arrive in Cambodia in late 2024. He said the tigers would be acclimatised to the environment before being released into the wild. Will be sent to a 90-hectare forest inside the Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary in Kang province. He did not give information about what type of tiger would be brought from India.
How are the preparations regarding tigers? Atitya said that officials this week started the work of installing more than 400 cameras at an interval of one kilometer in the Cardamom Mountain reserve to monitor wildlife, especially animals that are preyed upon by tigers like deer and boar.
He said the information received from the cameras “will help in breeding tigers.” He said that if the project runs smoothly, twelve more tigers will be imported in the next five years.
How tigers became extinct in Cambodia Deforestation and poaching have nearly decimated tiger populations throughout Asia. Due to continuous development in Cambodia, many forests were cut down and the habitat started increasing so much that the life of tigers started to be in danger. Due to this, they had to live in small living spaces, which affected their health and reproductive capacity.
As the forests decreased, tigers also started disappearing from Cambodia. The Asian countries Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have all lost their native tiger populations, while only 23 tigers are believed to be left in the forests of Myanmar. Cambodia and India signed an agreement on restoring tigers and their habitats in 2022.
According to government data released last year after a large-scale conservation campaign in India, the tiger population in the country was estimated to be more than 3,600.
The number of tigers in India in 2018 was 2,967. After an increase of about 24 percent in the last four years, India is home to 75 percent of the world’s tigers. According to the report on the status of tigers in India, Madhya Pradesh has the highest number of tigers (785) in the country. After this is Karnataka, where the total number of tigers in 2022 was 563. Questions on reintroduction of cheetahs in India: The number of tigers in India increased but the work of reintroduction of cheetahs remained in the headlines due to their deaths.
India is trying to rehabilitate cheetahs in Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. But the death of leopards one after the other has raised many questions. So far 10 leopards have died in Kuno National Park.
Native cheetahs in India became extinct 70 years ago but the government is running a campaign to re-establish cheetahs in Madhya Pradesh through its much talked about Project Cheetah.
For this, leopards were brought from Africa. On January 16, another cheetah, Shauryan, who had come from Namibia, had died. So far seven leopards and three cubs have died in Kuno National Park. 20 leopards were brought from Namibia and South Africa with the intention of settling leopards in Kuno National Park.
But 10 leopards have died so far due to various reasons. India’s Cheetah Project is one of the most ambitious projects in the world.
Officials want to bring 5 or 10 leopards every year and increase their number to 35 in the coming years. Report: Aamir Ansari.