Monday, October 20, 2008

Humans and endangered tigers










So my big question pertaining to endangered animals is, how much human involvement is too much? By human involvement i mean humans interacting with the endangered species whether the actions is productive or destructive to the species. For example, many zoos are trying to breed white tigers together to ensure the potential of white offspring. Breeding simultaneously acts as a good and bad effort to help the white tiger. Firstly, when the zoos breeds two white tigers today, because of the ancestry of most white tigers, the zoos end of inbreeding say a father and daughter tiger together. This type of breeding causes physical deformities, still births, and health defects. The upside to this breeding is that if the cubs survive they become a new addition to the population of white tigers that is currently declining. Therefore, this type of human involvement should be questioned as far as its true benefits to the species. An example of just plan cruel human interaction is poaching tigers for their body parts to be used in things like Traditional Chinese medicine. This aspect needs to discontinue immediately if white tigers are going to live for generations to come. Good human involvement, in my opinion, is making donations to wildlife foundations that fight to help ensure the animal's habitat stays intact and the poaching stops.

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