Interview: A New Strategy for Saving the World’s Wild Cats

This may be the Chinese Year of the Tiger, but the state of the world’s wild cats is not good, with populations of tigers plummeting to roughly 3,200 and the numbers of African lions and snow leopards also dramatically diminished. One of the world’s leading wild cat biologists, Alan Rabinowitz, is working to reverse this situation. As president and CEO of Panthera — a conservation group dedicated to saving wild cats across all their ranges worldwide — Rabinowitz oversees programs aimed at increasing wild tiger populations by 55 percent, creating a jaguar corridor across much of South and Central America, and establishing a network of linked refuges and corridors for lions across parts of Africa. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Rabinowitz explains why conservation groups must bear the main responsibility for bringing wild cats back from the brink, and why failure is not an option. “The world,” he says, “will absolutely be a much, much poorer — and, I believe, unhealthier — place with the loss of any of the world’s great cats.”
Read the interview