Hamilton, Mar 17 : Modern cricket’s greatest batsman, Sachin Tendulkar today pledged his support for tiger conservation.
Tendulkar said that the Indian cricket team supported the cause of the critically endangered species, whose numbers have been dropping alarmingly in the wild.
"At the start of the century, there were nearly 40,000 tigers in India. Today, that number has shrunk to 1,700 and we are losing at least one tiger a month. The rate at which the tiger is being hunted down is alarming," said Tendulkar, on the eve of India’s first cricket Test against New Zealand.
"When I was growing up, I was told there was an animal called a dinosaur. Tomorrow, we would probably be talking about the tiger in a similar way to our future generations. Something needs to be done soon to stop the tiger from vanishing from our forests," he said.