Xinhua reports that a disease common among pet dogs poses a serious threat to China’s remaining Siberian tigers:
Genetic studies have found the canine distemper virus strain is highly contagious to Siberian tigers, said Wang Xiaolong, professor at the Northeast Forestry University, at a seminar in Harbin, capital of China’s Heilongjiang Province, on Tuesday.
[…] According to the professor, disease control is now an urgent task in the tiger’s habitats, where dogs are popular pets but many of them are not properly vaccinated.
Fewer than 500 Siberian tigers remain in the wild, mainly living in eastern Russia, northeast China, and northern parts of the Korean Peninsula. China puts its own number of wild Siberian tigers between 18 and 22. [Source]
