International Tiger Day 2025: Did You Know Tigers Smell Like Popcorn And Can Leap 9 Meters?
The collaboration helped reinforce efforts towards Tiger preservation, with the creation of the Global Tiger Recovery Program for coordinated funding, law enforcement, habitat protection and overall monitoring of the great cause.
International Tiger Day mourns the loss of 97 per cent of Tigers in the last 100 years and promotes awareness and conservation efforts for the remaining. Since Tigers are apex predators, they play an influential role in maintaining an ecological balance of the wildlife, indicating a healthy forest ecosystem which guards against nature's decline.
The day also highlights threats and legal reinforcement against Tiger poaching and encourages governments, NGOs and communities to unite against habitat loss, climate change and human-wildlife conflict.
International Tiger Day 2025: 20 Facts About Tigers
Tigers are the largest wild cats in the world
Each Tiger carries a unique stripe pattern. These patterns help them disguise themselves behind the grass.
Tigers have stripes on their fur as well as on their skin.
Tigers weigh up to 363 kg and are 3.3 meters in length
Wildlife experts believe a Tiger's urine smells like buttered popcorn due to a compound called 2-AP. It can act as a warning sign for intruders in their territory.
Not just a menace on turf, the Tigers are excellent swimmers and can hunt inside water.
A Tiger's canines can reach 4 inches in length
The Siberian Tiger is the biggest in the world.
Expert at running and pouncing their enemies, Tigers have back legs longer than their front legs.
Tigers are hyper-carnivores, only eating meat.
A Tiger can eat nearly one-fifth of its body weight in a single meal, which is about 88 pounds or 40 kgs. Their yearly intake of meat is estimated to be about 8,000 pounds.
Contrary to their reputation, Tigers rarely attack humans unless provoked.
The Tiger is the national animal of India and Bangladesh.
India is home to 75 per cent of the world's wild tigers, with the Royal Bengal Tiger being the most famous for its features.
Tiger cubs are born blind and rely on scent to find their mothers.
Tigers are fantastic at luring animals into their region by imitating prey sounds.
Tigers can clean their wounds using their antiseptic saliva.
They have the largest brain of all cats and because of their size, can leap over 9 meters while also being able to jump 5 meters vertically.
Unlike a lot of group predators, Tigers are solitary hunters who are mostly active at night.
An active Tiger can run up to 65km/hour in short bursts.
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Time of India
3 days ago
- Time of India
UP home to four small wild cat species: Report
Lucknow: Recent findings indicate that caracals, among the most endangered small wild cats in India, are now limited to Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, while Uttar Pradesh houses four distinct small cat species. These details emerged from "Status of Small Cats in Tiger Landscapes of India," published by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) on July 29, International Tiger Day. It is the first such estimation of small wild cats in India. Of India's 10 small cat species, the report analyses nine varieties, including caracals, jungle cats, rusty-spotted cats, fishing cats, leopard cats, marbled cats, clouded leopards, desert cats, and Asiatic golden cats within tiger-inhabited states. Assam and West Bengal reported a maximum of six of these species each while five were recorded in Arunachal Pradesh. UP has four of them: jungle cat, fishing cat, leopard cat, and rusty-spotted cat. The report is based on camera trap data from the national tiger estimation done between 2018 and 2022. The jungle cat emerged as the most widespread while marbled cat, clouded leopard and Asiatic golden cat are rare and elusive. While jungle cats occupied over 96,275 sq km across diverse habitats, rusty-spotted cats occupied 70,075 sq km, having the second-highest occupancy. Leopard cats occupied the third biggest area, over 32,800 sq km. UP recorded all three widespread species, along with the fourth one, the fishing cat, which occupied a smaller area of over 7,575 sq km. Dudhwa Tiger Reserve has been selected for implementing a conservation programme for small wild cats by the MoEF in a first such initiative. India's small wild cats are listed under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Nevertheless, they are threatened due to habitat loss, man-wildlife conflict, hunting, poaching, climate change, prey base depletion, and road kills among other factors. The threat may be more severe for fishing cats and clouded leopards because they require specific types of habitats. Similarly, estimates showed that only 10 to 15 caracals may be present in the Kutch region of Gujarat and less than 50 in Rajasthan. Because these cats live close to human habitations, they face biotic pressure and conflict with humans. "Hybridisation with domestic cats is a growing concern, as interbreeding dilutes the genetic purity of its wild traits," said the report. "Clouded leopard is an extremely common species involved in the illegal wildlife trade," said the report. These cats are solitary, shy, elusive, crepuscular (active during twilight), and nocturnal hunters. Some species, like caracals, are also territorial in nature. The single most fundamental difference between big cats and small cats, as highlighted in the report, is their 'vocal anatomy', specifically the structure of the hyoid bone in their throat. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Friendship Day wishes , messages and quotes !
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Review: From the King's Table to Street Food by Pushpesh Pant
Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972. Fasting and feasting in Delhi's Jama Masjid market (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times) Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, 'Yeh asli nihari hai' — and how no one says that anymore. 406pp, ₹699; Speaking Tiger This is not history as chronology. It's history as residue. Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable 'object of study.' Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator which is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, refugee kitchens post-Partition, and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It's a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does. 'Who's to say what is authentic anymore?' is the book's real question. And when the book refuses to solidify meaning makes Pant's writing feel ungovernable by typical non-fiction standards. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context, and added footnotes like garnish. Pant gives you traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that. This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't 'correct' history. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, the archive, or the textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani out of what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid. What's interesting is how political that stance is. Pant doesn't need to say, 'Food is political.' He shows you a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: 'We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years.' That's a statement which dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It tells you that Delhi, like its food, has been in motion forever. Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but he's far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He's interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In that sense, he's doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy. The real protagonist of this book is change. You can see this in how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantewala's sohan halwa is more than just dessert, it's a ghost. It's a way to think about what happens when legacy stops being edible. Pant's nostalgia is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poked, disbelieved, laughed at. 'Memory tends to play strange tricks as you grow old and revisit old haunts, remembering them very differently,' he writes. That's the closest thing to a thesis this book can be. That is to say food is a memory device, and memory is unreliable on purpose. Here's what that does, formally. It frees Pant from the burden of being correct. He doesn't need to prove which dish came first, who made it, or where the cardamom was sourced. He needs only to make you believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And that someone else remembered it differently. The city's foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misrememberings. It's history told in gossip, grief, appetite, and spice. There's also something about the way Pant treats 'Delhi' as a signifier. The term 'authentic' loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only imitation, translation, and habit. He quotes generously, from cooks, vendors, family members, friends. 'Who's to say the street food we eat today isn't more honest than what the royals dined on?' he asks. The question is rhetorical, but the provocation is real. What if the greasy paratha on your plate tonight has more to say about Delhi than the feasts of Shah Jahan ever could? Let's pause there. That sentence 'more honest' is doing heavy lifting. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Purity? Origins? Intention? The paratha you eat today in Moolchand isn't less authentic than the one your grandfather ate, it's just a different version of the same desire. Which is perhaps the book's deepest claim: that taste is a theory of history. And when taste changes, so does everything else. To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps — of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is his unspoken obsession with disappearance. Foodways are how a people remember themselves, and when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly. But he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks about old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted. We get a map with missing neighbourhoods, a route that doubles back on itself. We also get an ethnography of hunger. What people in Delhi craved at different moments in time. What they missed. What they insisted on reinventing. This insistence is key. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It's a constant improvisation. He gives the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly, ceremonial became fast, fiery, and practical. Nihari, korma, and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen. We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates. This can make for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digressions pile up. A description of a long-lost kachori leads to a historical aside, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian influences and you feel the chapter is more compost than essay. But even this, I'd argue, is the form doing its work. Pant is essentially letting things rot. Break down. Ferment. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis. Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but often as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites. There is also an irony in the book – Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but he distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student from the hills. His nostalgia is earned, not inherited. And that makes him unique to write this kind of book. Author Pushpesh Pant (Courtesy the publisher) What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over. What stories repeat themselves in different accents. What dishes resurface years later under new names. This, I think, is the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations. So what does that make this book? A field guide to edible memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was 'what love tastes like when it breaks your heart.' You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is often more vivid than the event itself. And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything. Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
NDTV
6 days ago
- NDTV
Agniveers To Be Part Of Tiger Protection Force After Serving In Army: Uttarakhand Chief Minister
Dehradun: Agniveers will be inducted in the Tiger Protection Force in Uttarakhand's Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) after completing their four-year term in the Army, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has said. He added that this will be done on an experimental basis to strengthen the mechanism to prevent big-cat poaching and protect their habitat. Making the announcement on the occasion of International Tiger Day on Tuesday, Dhami said more than 80 youngsters will be inducted in the force that is being set up with the aim of strengthening the mechanism to protect tigers and their habitat. "This force will also be equipped with modern surveillance techniques like drones, thermal imaging and GPS tracking, which will increase its efficiency," he said. The prime function of the force would be to prevent the poaching of tigers. Trained jawans would patrol forest areas, collect intelligence and take strict action against poachers, the chief minister added. "Besides controlling wildlife crimes, this force will also control related crimes like timber smuggling, illegal mining and encroachment," he said. The Tiger Protection Force will help prevent deforestation and activities that harm the big cat's habitat, as well as assist in managing human-wildlife conflict. The rigourous training and discipline that an Agniveer has to undergo will render him a perfect fit for forest patrolling and dealing with wildlife crimes, Dhami said. He said if the Tiger Protection Force model succeeds in the CTR, one of the most important tiger habitats in the country, then it can be replicated in other reserves and protected areas.
