The wild population of tigers, estimated at 100,000 tigers around 1900, has declined to as few as 3,000 individuals today, with four of the eight originally designated tiger subspecies having become extinct in the wild. While numbers plummeted almost everywhere else in the vast range of tigers in Asia, the Russian population showed a remarkable opposite trend. At the start of the 1940’s the Amur tiger had been almost hunted to extinction in Russia with as few as 30 animals remaining. At this critical juncture the situation changed for the better when in 1947 Russia became the first country in the world to ban hunting of tigers. Hunting of the main prey species – ungulates – became restricted by an annual quota system. As a result of effective law enforcement, poaching of tigers became relatively rare and the Amur tiger made a remarkable recovery. In 2005 a full-range survey in Russia showed that the population had recovered to between 428 and 502 individuals (up from 415 to 476 in the previous 1996 count). Moreover, approximately 95% of the Amur tigers are part of one contiguous population, probably the largest in the world.

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