Baby cubs bring hope for South China tigers - the Daily Telegraph, Apr 7th 2008
By Nigel Blundell
These two tiny cubs have given hope for the survival of an entire species.
They are South China Tigers, the most endangered of all the world’s remaining tigers. And it is only down to a unique breeding programme that the animals stand a chance of increasing their dying numbers.
In the early 1950s, there were 4,000 tigers in China. Today there are less than 100 – perhaps only ten in the wild and the rest in zoos. The only hope for their future is a programme to breed a new generation of the beautiful creatures and repopulate China’s plains with the offspring.