It’s the Year of the Tiger.

I am a Tiger, having been born in 1974.

Today, less than 2,000 tigers live in the wild. They’re scheduled for extinction in our lifetime.

Ranked a favorite animal by children and their parents worldwide, year after year, three tiger species have nevertheless already gone extinct. You and I love tigers. You and I also love having a house and flying to New York or LA (at least) once a year and eating meals that, at least in restaurants, come from an average of 1,500 miles away. What’s that mean? That’s right, children…global warming!

AndGlobal Warming means…angry tigers.

Maybe they’ll hunt us down to levels sustainable for our ecosystem?

The above could be drawn by our children, in our lifetime. “Tigers are for zoos, daddy! Tigers are a baseball team, mom! Tigers in the wild? I don’t know. But Tigers are on youtube, they’re so cute, look:

Tigers on youtube, funny! 3 million views funny!

13 feet long, 900 pounds:

So why can’t we save the tiger? I’m not sure, this guy talks so fast.

BBC reports:

A great video on Project Tiger, by Sir David Attenborough:

Will the Goddess Durga win this one? Tigers hunting in open water:

Vaguely relevant videos:

Via the New York Times:

The crowd-pleasing Year of the Tiger, which begins Sunday, could be a lousy year for the estimated 3,200 tigers that still roam the world’s diminishing forests.

With as few as 20 in the wild in China, the country’s tigers are a few gun blasts away from extinction, and in India poachers are making quick work of the tiger population, the world’s largest. The number there, around 1,400, is about half that of a decade ago and a fraction of the 100,000 that roamed the subcontinent in the early 20th century.

Shrinking habitat remains a daunting challenge, but conservationists say the biggest threat to Asia’s largest predator is the Chinese appetite for tiger parts…

…

Although conservationists say India must do a better job of policing its 37 tiger reserves, they insist that the Chinese government has not done all it can to quell the domestic market for illicit tiger parts. Anti-trafficking efforts are haphazard, experts say; China bans the use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine but overlooks the sale of alcohol-based health tonics steeped in tiger bone.

It is a gray area that has been exploited by Chinese tiger farms, which raise thousands of animals with assembly-line efficiency…for the rest…click here. The photo alone is worth it.