Tigers and Endangerment

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammal
Order: Carnivore
Family: Felidae
Subfamily: Pantherdae
Genus/ Species: Panther Tigris

Tigers are unique by their stripes. No tiger has the same two stripes as a different tiger. Tigers have been alive for two million years. There are six species of tigers left in the world. The Bali, Caspain and Javan species of tigers have become extinct in the past seventy years. You will often see a tiger with an orange coat with black or brown stripes ascended with white. A tigers' tail is about 2-3 feet long, half the size of their body. Tigers use their tails for balance when running. A tigers' paw prints are called pug marks. A tiger will usually have the Chinese Wang or king on their forehead. They have round pupils with a yellow iris except white tigers have blue eyes. Tigers' night vision is six times better than humans. Tigers have retraceable claws and they are eighty to a hundred millimetres in length. Tigers use their claws to scratch on trees and make territory marks.

Adult tigers have thirty large teeth. The length of their teeth can be 2.5 to 3 inches long. Siberian Tigers are the heaviest of all the tigers, they can weigh up to five hundred pounds. The lightest of all the tigers is the Sumatran Tiger. The male Sumatran Tiger weighs up to two hundred fifty pounds and the female weighs about two hundred pounds. The average length of the tiger from the head to body is about 1.4 to 2.8 meters. The height at the shoulders is about ninety-five to a hundred ten centimetres. A tiger in the wild can eat up to forty pounds of meat at once. After eating a lot of meat a tiger won’t eat for several days.

A tiger will crawl slowly behind the prey and then charge from behind. It will attack the neck on small or medium prey and will attack the throat on larger prey. All wild tigers live in Asia. Most tigers like warmer places to live except for the Siberian Tiger. The Siberian Tiger likes the cold rather than the warm. Tigers don’t like open grass lands because it makes it harder to attack prey rather than in a forest. A tiger can sprint up to 35 miles per hour but only for a few seconds. Tigers don’t like chasing their prey, they like stalking them and then pouncing. Occasionally a tiger will kill a human if a logger or farmer moves to a place where tigers live. A sick tiger will find it easier than their regular prey. Once a tiger kills one person it will usually want to kill more people.

Tigers like living alone rather than in groups because it is much easier to attack their prey alone than in a group. Tigers will only live in a group if it is a mother and her cubs. The average litter is two to three cubs and one usually dies at birth. Cubs only weigh about two or three pounds. When the cub reaches eighteen months of age it will make its first hunt alone. The regular life span for a wild tiger is ten to fifteen years. A tiger in a zoo will live for about sixteen to twenty years.

Tigers are extremely endangered. There are only about 5000-7000 wild tigers left in Asia. Tigers live all over Asia. The Siberian Tiger lives in south eastern Russia. The South China Tiger lives in only southern China. The Indochinese Tiger is spread across south east Asia. The Bengal Tiger is found mostly in India. But the Sumatran Tiger is restricted on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra.

The tiger can crawl, walk, leap, swim, climb and run. They are excellent swimmers and are extremely territorial. In zoos they bred the Maltese Tiger but you could never see them in the wild. They are blue with black stripes.