The sad story of Europe’s tigers

Of the 10 Panthera tigris subspecies on record, only six remain. Three of these subspecies have been wiped out during the 20th Century, when tigers were found from Ukraine to Bali. The Caspian or ‘Persian’ tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) was the largest tiger subspecies, and its range bordered the Caspian Sea, including Turkey and Ukraine.

Weighing in at around 240kg, it is amongst the largest cats to have ever roamed Earth. It inhabited sparse forests and riverine corridors throughout its range, which at one point, stretched all the way into Western China. These fragile populations that relied on waterways to survive the harsh deserts were dependent on equally fragile populations of wild pigs and roe deer.

The demise of the Caspian tiger began with the Russian invasion of Turkestan in the late 19th Century. Military personnel would frequently hunt the tigers and their prey, as they further expanded into the desert. Vital reed beds were chopped down in favour of crops, which grew prosperously in the silt. By the 1930s, swine flu had also had a major impact on the wild pig populations across the tiger’s range.

In Turkey, the last reported killing of a Caspian tiger was in 1943. However, surveys in the region claimed that one to eight tigers were killed in Turkey each year, right up to the 1980s, suggesting that the last remaining Caspian tigers survived until the early 1990s. Although extinct across almost its entire range by the 1960s, there was one last recorded sighting of a Caspian tiger on the Afghan-Tajik border in 1998.

A Caspian tiger (P. tigris virgata) Credit: Berlin Zoo (1899)