Wild tigers face critical threats from habitat loss, prey depletion, and poaching, with welfare consequences for individual animals that include territorial conflict, starvation, and human-wildlife conflict.
Wild tigers experience welfare impacts that scale with the severity of human encroachment on their habitat. Territory shrinkage concentrates tigers in smaller areas, increasing inter-individual conflict and prey competition. Tigers that enter human settlements in search of prey face immediate lethal response. Snares set for deer — a primary prey species — catch tigers with devastating injuries. The welfare of individual wild tigers is inseparable from the state of their ecosystems: well-connected forests with abundant prey produce well-nourished, unstressed tigers; degraded fragments produce hungry, conflict-prone animals who suffer and are killed. Commercial captive tiger facilities impose a separate welfare catastrophe on tens of thousands of captive-bred tigers with no legitimate conservation purpose.