HELLUVA BOSS LET'S GOOOO

It’s fancy zoo speak for choosing to stop breeding them or getting new ones: it means once the current animals die of old age, they won’t be in AZA zoos anymore. The current generic tigers in AZA facilities - there’s very few of them now - are living out the rest of their lives in comfortable retirement, basically.

For folk not familiar with the term “generic tiger,” it means they’re basically subspecies mutts. Many of the tigers in zoos in the US and around the world don’t have a known lineage, and therefore it’s thought that their populations don’t serve a conservation purpose. (That claim can be debated, because imho seeing and learning about any tiger at all will increase people’s interest and investment in conservation, but that’s the official stance anyhow). Current tiger breeding programs in AZA zoos focus on specific subspecies: Amur/Siberian, Sumatran, and Malaysian.

You’ve come to the right place, friend. Figuring out if there’s any evidence that number is true has been my pet project for the past couple of years. I finally published all my research last December, and the answer is: it’s totally not real. 

I can’t tell you how many tigers there are in the US (I think I’ve figured out how to count them, but that level of time investment would require funding I don’t have) but I can tell you that none of the data related to big cats - animal sightings, injuries, sanctuary intake numbers over time - backs up a claim that high. 

The image reads: @WWF_Tigers: “More privately-owned tigers exist in US than wild ones in the world. WWF continues to call on US legislation to better control ownership of big cats, and prevent them from being laundered into wildlife trafficking rings #HoustonTiger” The image is a link to the CNN news story about the tiger. 

This is a problem. 

The number of tigers WWF is quoting here is 14 years old.

They’re from that one non-peer-reviewed census by Werner in 2005. As far as I can tell, WWF has been sourcing their 2008 “Paper Tigers” report for an estimated number of 5,000 tigers in the United States for the past 11 years. (Only 1,129 of those were actually in private or “pet” homes) The authors who wrote that report didn’t do their own census work on US tiger populations - instead, they used Werner’s 2005 paper as a major basis for their analysis, noted that it might not be completely accurate because of off-grid / hidden tigers, and ended by concluding there’s a “rough estimate of some 5,000 tigers in captivity” in the US. There has not been a single follow-up study in over a decade that has checked if those numbers are still accurate. (Except for mine, which indicates they’re not). 

More importantly, that report by WWF in 2008 found zero evidence that US tigers from the pet population were ending up in international black markets. They recommended a number of changes to the US regulatory system - like the closure of the generic tiger loophole in the Captive Bred Wildlife program - which have actually been implemented since, and laws about ownership and breeding of dangerous big cats in the US have only gotten stricter since 2008. It stands to reason that you’d expect less trafficking in that situation, not more. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that in all of the exposes about tiger farms and international black market trafficking of tiger parts published in the last couple years, not a single one even mentioned the participation of US entities or the involvement of US tigers! 

So, to sum up, WWF’s tiger account is tweeting out 14-year-old data and actively contradicting the results of one of their organizations’ own major reports. Apparently the “number of pet tigers in the US” is such common knowledge now that even international conservation organizations don’t need to fact-check it before they make public statements. 

1. This reply is two words and they managed to misspell both of then

solve the multiplication equation for each pair of individual digits and arrange them in the boxes just so

AND THEN ADD UP ALL THE NUMBERS IN EACH COLUMN AND GET THE RIGHT ANSWER????

So you start with a grid with as many squares as needed to write one number across the top and one number down the side. And draw these diagonal lines through them. Yes you should extend them out the side.

THEN you basically multiply the numbers that match with each square, put the tens digit in the top triangle and the ones digit in the bottom triangle. Like so:

so once you’ve done that, you start adding up the numbers in the DIAGONAL column/row thingies from the bottom right up to the top left, like so:

You only want one digit (tho I assume if the very top/last row somehow gets 2 digits that’s ok, but ONLY in that position) and you’ll carry over to the next column, like if you were adding normally.

Then you start at the top left and just take all the numbers going down and around and put them together!

It does take up a lot more space and has a few more steps than the more traditional long multiplication, I think, but for people who struggle with that I think this would be a handy tool!

Here’s a screenshot of the more traditional style to compare:

I genuinely don't understand

Viv has become the literal definition of "damned if she does, damned if she doesn't" thanks to these people.

Literally every single time when a sexuality gets confirmed that these people claim "doesn't make sense", their arguments literally always come down to stereotypes. So, what is it these people want?!??