INTRODUCTION

Large carnivores provide the ultimate test of society's willingness to conserve wildlife. They present a unique conservation challenge because first, large carnivores generally require large tracts of land, and second, they can and do kill people and domestic animals. Governments throughout the world are creating protected areas, suggesting that society seems willing to apportion some land for conservation, but whether it is willing to dedicate sufficiently large tracts, and whether it is willing to accept the risk of living in close proximity to large carnivores, are questions yet to be answered. Because human-induced mortality is one of the greatest threats to persistence of carnivore populations worldwide (Woodroffe and Ginsberg 1998), resolving human–carnivore conflicts is key to their survival. Whether a future exists for these most charismatic components of wild ecosystems will largely depend on networks of suitable habitat and intervention programmes that minimize risks to both carnivores and people.

In 1941 Kaplanov (1948) estimated that there were 20–30 Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) remaining in the Russian Far East. Harvest of tigers was outlawed in Russia in 1947, and collection of cubs for the world's zoos was sharply curtailed by 1957. Thereafter a slow but apparently steady growth in tiger numbers led to what many believe was a peak population of as many as 600 tigers at the end of the 1980s (Kucherenko 2001). A sharp increase in poaching in the first half of the 1990s (Galster and Vaud Eliot 1999) probably rapidly depressed tiger numbers.