Founders Note
Hermis Haridas & Nisha Purushothaman
Welcome to the seventh edition of PT Aware. With this edition, we enter our second year of publishing
If you grew up in India, China or Southeast Asia, your childhoods would have been incomplete without the magical tales of the tiger. Popular literature and folklore have featured the tiger prominently in these cultures both as heroes and villains.
They were both revered and feared and there was an aura of mysticism associated with these magnificent cats.
Tigers are difficult subjects to photograph, being extremely elusive in nature. The thick vegetation of their typical habitats combined with the clever camouflages helps them blend into their surroundings, making them difficult to sight and frame. But, once you get past these obstacles, they can give you awe-inspiring photographs.
It is our request to the nature photography community that you select a tour operator that benefits the local communities in all your expeditions. Conservation cannot be treated as a nature or scientific issue which has to be dealt with by conservationists and researchers. No conservation activity can be successful without the participation and support of the local communities, and hence modern conservation approaches take into account the social angle too. This is very salient for tiger conservation since one of the biggest threat to tigers is the demand for body parts worldwide. Awareness programs at both levels, the areas of poaching and the areas of consumption, along with strict action from various governmental agencies are the need of the hour.
We thank all the wonderful photographers who have contributed the wonderful photographs which you enjoy in the pages of this magazine. The worldwide PawsTrails community helps us to harness the power of community photography and use it as an effective tool to drive home the message of conservation and peaceful co-existence with our fellow beings. Thanks again for all the wonderful tiger images, and we pray for your continued support to help us tell the tales of fabulous species from different corners of the earth.
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Hermis Haridas & Nisha Purushothaman
Founders – Paws Trails Explorer