India has around 3,000 tigers

For 22 years vet, Akhilesh Mishra has been treating animals at Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh state in India.

He does not hesitate to name the tiger as his favourite animal. "They are so magnificent and beautiful. I just need to feel their soft skin to feel relaxed" he says. "!When I treat an injured tiger and then they are able to go back to forest, it is an out of this world experience."

A tiger's life is not easy, he says, particularly for the females: "For me the tigress is much stronger than the male tiger. She fights so fearlessly for her cubs. She is a goddess - ready to take on a huge tiger who tries to harm her cubs."

Tiger

Indian tigers face threat due to lack of genetic diversity.

Tigers need genetic diversity to survive. India's tigers are facing extinction owing to a collapse in the variety of their mating partners, say Cardiff University researchers. They found that 93% of DNA variants found in tigers shot the period of the British Raj were not present in tigers today Prof Mike Bruford said the genetic diversity needed for the species to survive had been "lost dramatically".

There are fewer than 2,000 tigers left worldwide, 60% in India. The Cardiff university team collaborated with the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India on the research. They had unprecedented access to the Natural History Museum of London's tiger collection which allowed them to identify the DNA variants in the tigers killed in the British Raj period from 1858 to 1947 but which have disappeared today. Mechanised trophy hunting reduced the animal's numbers from 40,000 in a mere 100 years. The territory occupied by the tiger has declined more than 50% during the last three generations and mating now only occurs in 7% of its historical territory.