20% increase in tiger population in India

[Jade]

No govt will mess with Gujarati Asmita.

It's ridiculous. The Gujarat govt refused to lend animals to repopulate other parts of the country with them. Want to protect their "tourist attraction".

A record 2.71L tourists visit Gir in a year
TNN Jul 31, 2011, 05.19am IST

AHMEDABAD: Gir, the only place in the world where you can see Asiatic lions in the wild, recorded its maximum visitors in the 12 months till March 2011.

The sanctuary registered a footfall of 2.71 lakh tourists in this period, which is 32 per cent higher than 2009-10. Forest department sources say there was a 19 per cent rise even among foreign tourists. The sanctuary has 411 lions as per the May 2010 census.

The data reveals that 55 per cent of these tourists came in November, December and January. Of the 6,152 foreign tourists who visited Gir in the year till March last, 3,328 came in December, January and February. The trend was mainly because of festivals like Christmas, Diwali and Uttarayan.

 

[rajusri]

Thanks everyone for good posts and your great feeling for the big cats.

Good for the tiger. Can people please save the Asiatic lion now?

Good. India is the only country in Asia with lions. This is our great treasure. We should protect it anyhow. Govt and NGOs are making great efforts but international cooperation is required.

 

[takeiteasy]

We lost Indian Cheetah due to extinction.

Asiatic Lions and Indian Tigers are our last chance to save magnificent species from getting extinct from the planet.

 

[Pride]

I was sad. How can we kill our own national animal?
Tiger is a magnificent cat and am happy that the tiger population has increased by 20%. I say we should aim for around 10000 tigers by 2020.

We Humans are being animals day by day. 2 days ago my 10 yr nephew watched in News, How people killed a panther by stones who were stuck in some river. He was very sad, did not eat Dinner and slept. This is what is happening every day and we feel helpless.

 

[Thorough Pro]

Well done Inia.

 

[Chogy]

It's sad... lions used to be all over the Old World, into Europe and deep into Asia. The Lion became the symbol of Royalty in England, not because they admired a big cat from a distant land, but because deep in their memory was the knowledge of Lions that cohabited Europe with people.

Lions were drawn by primitive men in France:

Lions were common in Persia, Greece, and Turkey, well into the 1900's... amazing!

The habitat of lions originally spanned the southern parts of Eurasia, ranging from Greece to India, and most of Africa except the central rainforest-zone and the Sahara desert. Herodotus reported that lions had been common in Greece around 480 BC; they attacked the baggage camels of the Persian king Xerxes on his march through the country. Aristotle considered them rare by 300 BC. By 100 AD they were extirpated.[126] A population of the Asiatic Lion survived until the tenth century in the Caucasus, their last European outpost.[127]
The species was eradicated from Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the eighteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they became extinct in North Africa and Southwest Asia. By the late nineteenth century the lion had disappeared from Turkey and most of northern India,[15][128] while the last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in Iran was in 1941 (between Shiraz and Jahrom, Fars Province), although the corpse of a lioness was found on the banks of the Karun river, Khūzestān Province in 1944.