Breeding

Monday, April 27, 2009

Today’s Telegraph has an image gallery showing captive tigers in a Buddhist enclave in The Tiger temple in Kanchanaburi, Thailand

Image number seven bears the caption “Conservationists worry that the temples allows different subspecies of tigers to interbreed”.

Hah!

I think that the definition of a species is that (set of animals) which can breed with each other successfully.

We humans are all of the same (human) species, so Australians can breed with Poles can breed with Chinese can breed with Africans can breed with …

Horse and Donkeys can breed, but they are of different species, so they cannot breed successfully; the offspring is a sterile mule, a device that cannot propagate, a dead end.

So either the (unnamed) conservationists are wrong, dead wrong (species don’t interbreed, by definition), or their true fear is that (presumably) valuable mammalian eggs and sperm are being tossed into dead-end offspring, reducing the pool of larger available fertile members of the parenting species.

If the latter, then they should say so.

Perhaps they did.

Then The Telegraph should report that rather than the bleak mis-informative text of the caption.

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