Save China's Tigers

Save China's Tigers (SCT) is an international charitable foundation based in Hong Kong, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Office in London) which aims to save the big cats of China from extinction. It focuses on the Chinese tigers (South China tigers). It also has branches in Mainland China and South Africa. According to Save China's Tigers, the organization's vision is to raise awareness of the plight of the Chinese tiger and to strive for its protection and preservation through public education, introduction and experimentation with advanced conservation models in China and abroad, and raising funds to support these initiatives. Another aim is to act as a liaison for all those organizations concerned with the conservation of China's wildlife, sustainable development, biodiversity and habitat. According to Save China's Tigers the organizations goal is to reverse the fate of the South China tiger from the brink of extinction by taking them out of zoos, breeding them, letting them regain their hunting abilities, and reintroducing them back to China's wild. "Save China's Tigers" was founded in 2000 by Li Quan. Stuart Bray, her then-husband and a former executive at Deutsche Bank, helped fund the nascent enterprise. The word "rewilding" was coined by conservationist and activist Dave Foreman, first occurring in print in 1990. The concept was further defined and expanded by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss in a paper published in 1998. According to Soulé and Noss, rewilding is a conservation method based on "cores, corridors, and carnivores." In order to be successfully reintroduced into a wild environment, tigers must know how to hunt prey and have to be able to defend themselves. Once in captivity, an animal will gradually lose its ability to survive in the wild, and will likely die if released. Thus Save China's Tigers started a rehabilitation programme to help captive tigers regain their survival skills. Rehabilitation steps taken by the project include feeding the tigers with carcasses of small game.