Word: wildness
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...identify gaps larger than 3 km in tiger-friendly habitats and work out ways to bridge them. The Terai Arc program gives local people incentives to plant trees or tall thatch grass, which they can harvest and which tigers can use as cover. As forests and grasslands recover, deer, wild pigs and other tiger prey return. "Big cats can handle a modest amount of disturbance," observes WCS's Ginsberg, "but what they really need is cat food...
Predation on livestock is the biggest reason for human--big cat conflict around the world. The solution is to make it harder for the cats to capture domesticated animals than wild prey. Cats are opportunistic hunters and will generally not go out of their way to kill a sheep if it is easier to jump a deer or an antelope...
...Donana National Park in Southern Spain, scientists are attempting one of conservation's most difficult feats: breeding predators in captivity to reintroduce them to the wild. Reintroduction is generally regarded as a last resort by biologists, but in the case of the Iberian lynx, there's no choice. Severely overhunted for decades, the species has been declining rapidly since the 1950s, when the rabbit population it dines on was decimated by disease. Today the lynx is the world's most endangered cat, down to fewer than 200 in Spain and probably extinct in Portugal. "There are only two reproducing populations...
...importing Anatolian shepherds, 160-lb. dogs bred in Turkey to protect livestock from wolves. She trains the Anatolians and then gives them to ranches, where they will stand their ground against the much smaller cheetah. Problem cheetahs that kill cattle are sometimes captured and fed an alternating diet of wild game and beef laced with lithium chloride. The beef sickens the cheetahs, persuading them to stick to wild meat...
...Mortensen. Big cats cannot help themselves; they are natural-born killers. To keep them in a world where wilderness areas are shrinking will require all the innovative strategies that conservationists can muster. Otherwise these majestic creatures will end up living out their days in zoos--banished forever from the wild where they belong. --With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas and Simon Robinson/Johannesburg