Pre-industrial emblem
69Heraldry, materia medica or first-fish law met the tiger before film.
Tiger · Asia largest cat — subspecies maps, 1973 Project Tiger, and roughly 4,000 remaining wild animals still frame a century of recovery arithmetic.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Global estimates in the 2020s sit near 4,000-5,500 depending on the year and method. India holds the majority. The number is a camera-trap product, not a Victorian hunter tale.
India wild counts rose from a 1970s crisis to the largest national population. Methods changed (pugmarks to cameras), so the graph is not a single instrument. Southeast Asia did not copy the rebound.
A 2010 pledge by tiger-range states in St Petersburg to double wild numbers by 2022. Some countries gained; others lost. The slogan outlived the deadline.
Lions are Vulnerable with a wider African footprint and a tiny Gir relic. Tigers are Endangered, more forest-bound, and culturally heavier in South and East Asia. Scores stay relative across all 24 types.
A hunter of man-eaters who wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) and later lent his name to India first national park -- a colonial-to-reserve arc.
Panthera tigris tigris now lumps many mainland tigers in some taxonomies; Amur animals still have a Russian-Chinese border programme and a different prey winter.
IUCN: Endangered
Tiger culture is local: the same silhouette is a licence in one country and a logo in another.
Status bars are editorial -- they track how loudly this type spoke in English-language media and law, not a best-species score.
Heraldry, materia medica or first-fish law met the tiger before film.
Canneries, ivory, longlines or shikar scaled the take.
A film, book or NGO mark often outran the field paper.
ESA, CITES, IWC or national parks made the type a legal object.
Streams, jeeps and auctions are the present tense of attention.
Colonial photographs treated a skin as a career.
Man-eaters entered English as a hill genre.
A government logo as much as a cat.
Shere Khan as the global stripe.
Camera numbers as national pride.
Storm and sting as the other tiger story.
Ranthambore and Bandhavgarh time jeeps to a named cat.
India all-India exercise is a bureaucratic festival.
Diplomats still toast a 2010 slogan.
A social pantherine whose prides, Gir relic and 2015 Cecil killing still structure African conservation politics.
Overall 66 🐘The atlas type is the bush elephant -- an ecosystem engineer whose ivory ban (1989) and split from forest elephants still structure African conservation.
Overall 61 🐺A Holarctic pack hunter whose 1995 Yellowstone return and older Leopold ethics still structure predator politics.
Overall 78 🐼A bamboo specialist whose WWF logo, Wolong quake and 2016 IUCN downlist from EN to VU made a recovery into a brand.
Overall 41 🐻A marine bear whose seal-and-ice budget made Churchill, Knut and climate models into one public animal.
Overall 56 🦍The atlas type is the western gorilla -- a knuckle-walking ape whose Fossey-era mountain cousins and Koko lab fame split one public name.
Overall 45 🐋The largest animal whose 1966 IWC protection, 1982 moratorium and still-thin Antarctic recovery define a hunted giant.
Overall 65