BBC NATURAL WORLD: BATTLE TO SAVE TIGER 2 OF 3

BBC NATURAL WORLD: BATTLE TO SAVE THE TIGER PART 2 OF 3 As we see from Natural World (BBC1). You can't really go wrong with a film about tigers, and this one is especially beautiful. India's a perfect backdrop - with romantic, ruined palaces perched precariously on top of jungly hills, and huge fruit bats flopping about in front of the moon. But the message isn't a good one: tigers are on the way out. And here's the evidence - dozens of tiger skins, taken from just one smuggler's truck, all laid out on a road. Actually it looks OK, a road carpeted in tiger skins, in a decadent 1970s kind of way. I might suggest it to my local residents' association. And cars would probably slow down, out of respect, making the streets safer for children. If India's tigers are going down, they may as well do so in a good cause. Back east, it's the Chinese who are to blame, for using ground-up tiger bones instead of Viagra - bones for boners. Come on, guys, that's simply wrong, use rhino horns instead - the horn for the horn - because rhinos are less cute. Blake never wrote a poem about one, did he? Rhino rhino, big and grey/charging 'cross the plains all day ... I don't think so. The Tibetans are also the problem, for making tiger skin the Burberry of the high plains. Well, it was a problem until the Dalai Lama spoke out, with his official fashion statement. "Tiger skins?" he said to his people. "So last year, darling! Burn them!" And they did. But, most of all, it's India itself that is the problem, for being so hopeless at saving its own tigers. They set up these organisations that have top-level meetings and say all the right things, but very little is actually done and the poachers keep on killing the tigers, right under the noses of the people who are supposed to be looking after them. And now there are these lovely tiger sanctuaries, with guards and everything, just lacking one thing: tigers. Sort it out; tigers are cool. by Sam Wollaston