Its true, and maybe irrelevant. There is no place for tigers on a settled planet. We have many uses for land, and letting fabulously dangerous carnivores randomly wander huge tracts is one of the less important ones.

I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.

Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.

We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.

I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.

Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.