Name: Why Are There So Many Tigers In Texas?
Uploaded: 2017-08-24T13:56:19.000Z
Duration: 2 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

With a unique set of stripes for camouflage,
and the strongest bite and most body mass

Adverbs of degree

of any big cat, tigers are perfectly built
for a life of stealthy, brutal nighttime ambushes

in the jungle, consuming about 150 pounds
worth of prey each week.

And yet, today, there are just about as many
of these apex predators pacing the backyards

of Texas as there are roaming the wild in
the whole rest of the world.

That’s partly because there’s no law against
owning a tiger in Texas, as long as you’ve

got 300 square feet of space and an eight-foot
fence.

And apparently, Texans are really enthusiastic
about the idea of owning a charismatic - deadly

Only a few hundred owners have officially
registered their pets with the state, but

rescue shelters field so many calls from distressed
Texans who are either going broke buying cat

food, or are worried about becoming cat food
themselves, that experts estimate the actual

Texan tiger population to be around 3,000.

Tiger researchers in Asia have used camera
traps to come up with roughly the same estimate

But while the number of wild tigers continues
to decline – due to both poaching and a

decrease in prey – the captive Texan tigers
will most likely keep multiplying.

Not only are the cultural climate and actual
climate right for exotic pet ownership, but

tigers – unlike other endangered megafauna
– actually breed really well in captivity.

And it’s because of all that food - even
in a small enclosure, a well-fed female can

give birth to more than a dozen cubs a year,
several times more than her wild relatives.

At the rate they’re disappearing from the
forests of Asia and popping up in the backyards

of America, tigers may soon go from being
a symbol of wildness to being yet another

sign that everything really is bigger in Texas.

Speaking of felines, we wanted to introduce
you to the cats of MinuteEarth.

Neko, Paka, Waffles, and Yardley often make
cameos in our team meetings and occasionally

contribute to scripts by lounging on our keyboards.

And from all the cats AND people of MinuteEarth,
we want to say a huge thank you to the sponsor

of this video: the University of Minnesota,
where students, faculty and staff across all

fields of study are working to solve the Grand
Challenges facing society.

University of Minnesota professor J.L. David
Smith and his students, including Anup Joshi

have been studying tigers in the wild for
more than 25 years.

Their CLAWS Lab has helped document the poaching,
habitat loss and inbreeding that are hurting

But they’ve got some good news too: people
banding together in Nepal to restore community

forests are not only producing more wood for
themselves but are creating more habitat for

deer – and for the tigers that prey on them.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why Are There So Many Tigers In Texas?

apparently

community

consume

predator