How long have tigers been endangered?
Alan Rabinowitz: That’s a very good question. Part of the problem is that nobody has been actually counting tigers, following tigers. It’s only been a little over 10 years that people have come up with a technology using camera trapping in a certain grid formation to get accurate density estimations of tigers. Until that time we didn’t really know how to count tigers. People did things like estimating tiger numbers by their tracks—their pug marks—but the main place to do that was the tiger reserves in India. And that, in fact, contributed to years [of inaccuracy], whether it was by the technique being bad or because of the people doing it just not reporting it accurately because their promotions were based on tiger numbers going up. For years and years India reported huge successes in tiger populations and tiger numbers when in fact anybody who was on the ground actually looking at tigers—me included—realized that tigers were declining. Drastically. When I started in ’93 or so in Indoc
