Our Mission:

To promote and raise money to protect the preservation of the world’s last wild tigers and their environment.

The Wild Tiger Fund Australia (WTFA) was founded by Pamela Sutton in 1998 because not enough was being done to effectively protect the tiger in the wild.

This is not an issue of preserving wild animals for western tourists to enjoy in safari parks.This is about our ability to protect an animal that is loved and revered by all peoples for its grace, strength and beauty. It is about the tiger as a foundation species - if we cannot save the tiger, an animal so many people love, what can we save?

If we want tigers to still be around for the next Year of the Tiger in 2010 we must take action now. Already the Chinese and Javanese tigers are extinct - worldwide we are down to less than 4,000 individual animals by some estimations - over 95% of the world's tiger populations are gone - victims of hunters, prey depletion and deforestation.

Why are tigers becoming extinct?

The tigers' biggest threat comes from the only place it can look for its future survival - human beings.

In a few years tigers will effectively be extinct in the wild unless some action is taken now. A few individuals and conservation groups are working tirelessly to stop this from happening. WTFA is one of them.

Tigers are disappearing for three main reasons:

Poaching
Loss of Habitat
Traditional Chinese Medicine practices

Tigers are a rare commodity. Less than 4,000 existing ANYWHERE IN THE WILD WORLD. The more rare they become, the more some people want to exploit them. Poachers cash in on a huge market in illegal animal trafficking – a trade worth over $6 billion dollars and only rivalled by the drugs and arms trade - in part motivated by the Traditional Chinese Medicine market.

Many animals, including tigers, are poached for their bones, blood and to a lesser extent their skins to become ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine ‘remedies’. It is a sad indictment of our society that an animal as beautiful and loved as the tiger is increasingly ending up poisoned, skinned, deboned and ground up into powder for rheumatism ‘cures’. An aspirin could achieve the same result.