MOSCOW, July 28. /TASS/. The number of Amur tigers in Russia has exceeded 750 cats, including tiger cubs, the director general of the Amur Tiger Center and his colleague and Amur tiger expert said at a joint press conference dedicated to International Tiger Day, celebrated on July 29.

"Over the past 10 years, as we have seen in real life, the number of tigers has grown. <...> In this year’s March, there were at least 750 tigers in the country, including tiger cubs," Director General of the Amur Tiger Center Sergey Aramilev said.

In 2005, the number of tigers was estimated at 450-500, and in 2015 it was about 600, Amirkhan Amirkhanov, adviser to the head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources and head of the working group on the census of the Amur tiger in 2021-2022, said.

Over the last ten years, according to the director general of the Amur Tiger Center, wildlife conservationists have managed to create a sustainable system of wildlife protection. Russia has become a world leader in returning animals to the wild, including predators that can be dangerous in certain conditions, as well as animals that were shot and had to undergo major operations. Thus, 18 tigers have been returned to their natural habitat. Russian scientists managed to restore the tiger population in the Jewish Autonomous Region, which saw the tiger disappear in the late 1970s. It only returned there in 2012. Tigers have found a home in the Amur Region, where one of the tigresses gave birth to cubs.

 

First safe conduct for Amur tiger

 

As Aramilev recalled, the 75th anniversary of the first regulatory legal act prohibiting the hunting of the Amur tiger was recently celebrated. At first, the ban applied only to the territory of the Khabarovsk Region, later to the Primorsky Region as well, and then all other regions of the tiger's range.

The original document is kept in the Khabarovsk Region’s State Archive. This was the first ban on tiger hunting in the world. In India, for example, hunting tigers was banned only in 1971.