Understanding the welfare challenges facing the approximately 5,500 remaining wild tigers, from poaching and habitat loss to human-tiger conflict, and the interventions that support both tiger survival and welfare.
Tiger welfare in the wild encompasses both the conservation-scale threat to population viability and the individual welfare experience of tigers navigating increasingly human-dominated landscapes. Snared tigers experience prolonged suffering — snares grip limbs and cause progressive injury, infection, and death over days or weeks. Tigers in conflict zones face retaliatory killing after livestock predation, often through methods that cause significant suffering. Conservation programs that reduce human-tiger conflict through livestock compensation schemes, improved livestock husbandry, and early warning systems protect tigers from retaliatory killing while addressing genuine welfare concerns for humans who lose their livelihoods. Individual tiger welfare and population conservation are inseparable in human-dominated landscapes.