Tiger hunting is the capture and killing of tigers. Humans are the tigers' most significant predator, and illegal poaching is a major threat to the tigers. The Bengal tiger is the most common subspecies of tiger, constituting approximately 80% of the entire tiger population in Indian Sub-Continent, and is endemic to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and India. Tigers have mythological, cultural and religious significance in these countries. Foreign big game hunters saw hunting of tigers as a symbol of masculinity and an adventurous sporting event. It has been hunted in these countries for centuries. In 1924, the tiger population in Asia was estimated to be more than 100,000. However, within less than a hundred years, it had declined to fewer than 3,200. Tigers have historically been a popular big game animal and has been hunted for prestige as well as for taking trophies. Extensive poaching has continued even after such hunting became illegal and legal protection was provided to the tiger. Now a conservation-reliant endangered species, the majority of the world's tigers live in captivity. Tigers were once considered to be harder to hunt than lions, due to their habit of living alone in dense cover and not noisily asserting their presence with roars as often.
History
Historically, tigers have been hunted on foot, horseback, elephant-back, and from machans. Any of these involved considerable danger and the hunting of a tiger had been considered a manly and a courageous feat with game, trophies being collected as the symbols of valor and prestige. Accounts of British royalty photographed aside dead tiger carcasses during the late 19th and early 20th centuries depict the construction of the successful conquest of Indian nature, thus symbolizing the imperial, masculine identities desired by the British. In some places such as China, tigers were also perceived to be a threat to human life in the area, so those who managed to kill them were hailed as heroes to the general public. In 1986, it was discovered that tigers were declining rapidly due to being poisoned, snared or shot and then smuggled out of India to supply medicinal manufacturers in China. By 1992, the trade industry paid a total of $12.4 million for 200 tigers that were harvested by poachers. Since that time, the Chinese have banned poaching and the tiger part trade. However, this has only increased the value of poached tigers. Individual poachers now get approximately $800 per tiger, but those associated with well-known established gangs can receive up to $5,000 per body received. In addition to poaching, to compensate for the banning of trade in tiger parts, China has begun harvesting tigers by means of "tiger farming." This enables them to breed captive tigers for the purpose of selling their parts.
India
From time immemorial, humans and tigers have co-existed throughout the Indian subcontinent. In fact, tigers were revered and worshiped in the forests and grasslands it shared with people throughout the region. While the tigers in India were widely extant and not threatened up to the first decades of the twentieth century, hunting and habitat loss reduced their population in India from 40,000 to less than 1,800 in a mere hundred years. Despite the prevalence of tiger hunting as a royal sport for centuries, the consequences were larger during the British Raj due to the hunters' use of far superior firepower, and their interest to hunt shared by a much larger number of colonial aristocrats led to further depletion. Hunting events were chronicled in detail by the British officers in their personal diaries, memoirs, official gazetteers and their photographs, with successful tiger hunts being seen as a symbol of the successful conquest of nature by civilised, manly Britons. British rulers enacted Forest Act of 1878 which enabled them to treat forest area as hunting grounds. British officially killed 1,579 tigers in the year 1878. In 1882, the British officials paid £4800 in rewards for killing 1,726 tigers. Maharaja of Surguja killed 1,710 tigers in his hunting quests. George Yule, a British civil servant in Bengal Presidency had killed more than 400 tigers during his administration. Duke of Windsor shot 17 tigers in one week in 1921 King George V on his visit to Colonial India in 1911 killed 39 tigers in a matter of 10 days One of these is on display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. As of 2022, India contains 75 percent of the global tiger population.
Tsarist Russia
In the first years of the 20th century, the Imperial Russian government began a plan to colonise the Central Asiatic lands inhabited by the Caspian tiger. The Russian local authorities worked heavily to exterminate tigers during a huge land reclamation program in areas such as the Syr-Daria and Amu-Daria rivers and the Aral Sea. The Russian army was instructed to exterminate all tigers found around the area of the Caspian Sea, a project that was carried out very efficiently. Once the extermination of the Caspian tiger was almost complete, the farmers followed, clearing forests and planting crops. Due to intensive hunting and deforestation, the Caspian tiger retreated first from the lush lowlands to the forested ranges, then to the marshes around some of the larger rivers, and finally, deeper into the mountains, until it almost certainly became extinct. The last stronghold of the Caspian tiger in the former Soviet Union was in the Tigrovaya Balka area, in Tajikistan. Though the tigers were reported as being found here until the mid-1950s, the reliability of these claims is unknown.
Soviet Union In the early years of the Russian Civil War, both Red and White armies based in Vladivostok nearly wiped out the local Siberian tigers. In the 1920s, tigers were heavily persecuted by the Communists, who would on occasion bag up to eight or ten on a single outing. Legal tiger hunting within the Soviet Union would continue until 1947, when it was officially prohibited.
People's Republic of China In 1959, during the PRC's Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong declared South China tigers as enemies of man, and began organizing and encouraging eradication campaigns. By the early 1960s, Chinese tigers had been reduced to just over 1,000 animals. A decade later, their range was reduced to three regions in southern China, two of which were located in the Jiangxi Province.
Tigers in traditional Chinese medicine
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