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

[GuateGojira]

(12-19-2018, 08:21 PM)peter Wrote: And here's the, alleged, former Imperial Hunting Reserve (from 'The Tiger's Claw', M.L. Taylor, 1956):

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

According to G, Jankowski, the Imperial Hunting Reserve (also known as the Imperial Tiger Park) was created by one of the Manchurian Emperors. As hunting wasn't allowed for centuries (...), animals thrived. There are many rumours about the size of tigers in the Imperial Tiger Park. 

This is the part that worried me a time ago @peter. According with Susie Green in her book "Tiger" of 2006 (from the Animal series), in page 13 to 15 she says this:

"Besides differing coat markings, there is a huge variation in size between these subspecies, mainly because in hot climates animals usually decrease in size (the smaller the animal, the greater the evaporation surface area as a proportion of body weight, allowing more efficient dissipation of heat). However, Baikov and Yankovsky, hunting in Manchuria in the first half of the twentieth century, insist very large and much smaller tigers inhabited the same areas and that they were separate subspecies. As tigers are virtually extinct in the area it is impossible to check this, but Yakovsky claimed that many hundreds of years ago the ancient Mongol emperors designated hundreds of square miles of land north of theTumen river, quite nearwhat is now Vladivostok, as a sanctuary for tigers and leopards imported from India.(4) Over several centuries evolution, probably combined with selective culling of small tigers, lead to the emergence of a race of massive tigers possessing heavy, luxuriant, light-coloured coats, and reaching 4.25 m in length and weighing over 250 kg. Eventually, the sanctuary was abandoned and the tigers spread north to Sakhalin island and south to Korea and northern China, where they bred with the local tiger population creating a massive subspecies. Others claim that certain local mineral salts are responsible for the tiger’s great growth.(5) Yankovsky killed what was probably the last of these tigers around 1956."

She quote this source for the specific part about the sanctuary:
4. Mary Linley Taylor, The Tiger’s Claw: The Life-story of East Asia’s Mighty Hunter (1956).

IF, and only IF this is true, this suggest that the huge size of the Amur tigers actually came from the Bengal tigers! Did you ever found any information about this? I ask you because you collect old books. This is a mystery that botters me since while ago. Reply