ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[peter]

PANTHERA TIGRIS AMOYENSIS - F - TIGER SIEGE 1 


F1 - Introduction

Post 1,140 of Betty has a number of links to newspaper articles and online articles. If you want to read them, you have no option but to use the translator. Thye reason is that all articles are in Chinese.

The problem is that the translator is far from perfect. How get to the core of articles when the translation produced something very difficult to understand? Here's how I solved most problems.

I printed all articles and read each of them one or two times. I read the most interesting again. After reading, I made notes. Lot of them. The notes enabled me to get to the core of the story. When I was done, I read what I had. Not everything was clear, but the bits and pieces of information were enough to understand what happened.

When I had prepared a number of posts, I tried to find some kind of confirmation of the stories described in the articles. The internet produced in that I found much more than expected. 
 

F2 - Some points to remember when reading the stories

In the late forties of the last century, a land reform program was started in China. Small farmers got a piece of land and were instructed to cultivate it. The aim of the program was to lift the production of food. In order to assist the would-be farmers, it was decided to limit the number of wild animals. Animals able to destroy crops, that is. Thousands upon thousands were killed in some way or another. The government-sponsored program soon resulted in empty forests. Later, forests had all but gone. 

One result was barren hills, land slides and polluted rivers. Another result was hungry tigers.

Tigers hunt animals that destroy crops, like wild boars and many species of deer. When they disappeared, tigers suffered. Desperate tigers started killing domesticated animals first. Desperate farmers trying to protect them were next. There are no official statistics about the number of people killed by tigers, but in Hunan Province only tigers killed nearly 2 000 people in the period 1952-1963.

The war on wild animals started in the late forties and lasted until the early seventies. The period 1949-1965 in particular was grim. Most stories happened in that period. Reply