Sumatran tiger facing extinction

By Gilllian Murdoch

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Tiger teeth, claws, skin and whiskers are being openly sold in Sumatra, Indonesia, threatening the island's big cats with extinction, a report by wildlife monitoring group Traffic said on Wednesday.

A survey of 326 goldsmiths, traditional Chinese medicine outlets and souvenir and antique shops carried out by the British-based group in 2006, estimated at least 23 tigers had been killed to produce the contraband products it found.

"This is down from an estimate of 52 killed per year in 1999-2002," said Julia Ng, Program Officer with Traffic Southeast Asia and lead author of the report, The Tiger Trade Revisited in Sumatra, Indonesia.

"Sadly, the decline in availability appears to be due to the dwindling number of tigers left in the wild," she said.

Hit by forest clearances, killings due to human-tiger conflict, and illegal hunting for the trade in their parts and derivatives, tiger numbers have halved from an estimated 1,000 in the 1970s.

"The Sumatran tiger population is estimated to be fewer than 400 to 500 individuals. It doesn't take a mathematician to work out that the Sumatran Tiger will disappear like the Javan and Bali tigers if the poaching and trade continues," she said.

UNLUCKY CHARMS?

The Sumatran tiger, Panthera tigris sumatrae, is the most critically endangered of the world's tiger subspecies.