Wild tigers face severe welfare threats from poaching, habitat loss, and the welfare problems of tigers in captive facilities that do not meet the needs of this wide-ranging apex predator.
A tiger in an inadequate captive facility — pacing the same few metres of concrete enclosure repeatedly — is experiencing a welfare deficit that its complex cognitive needs make severe. Tigers are wide-ranging solitary hunters with home territories of 20-100 km² in the wild; no captive facility can provide comparable space, but the difference between an adequately enriched large natural enclosure and a barren cage represents an enormous welfare gap. Wild tigers face the acute welfare trauma of snare injuries and the threat of death from poisoning and shooting. The suffering of individual tigers in illegal trade — transported in cramped conditions, de-clawed for tourist interactions, kept in barren captivity — represents some of the most severe individual welfare problems in wildlife exploitation.