But then, he weighs 340 pounds and has to keep his strength up. He can expect to live another five or six years at the zoo, though in the jungle he would be running out of time at 14. Rokan, a Sumatran male, the smallest of the five surviving subspecies, is considered overweight at 338 pounds, so he gets only 30 pounds of meat a week. At 186 pounds, Soy eats 32 pounds of meat a week. These animals are something special.
Carnivores eat only meat, of course, which means they eat other mammals that live on plants.
Which means they need a huge amount of space, because their habitat has to include not only plenty of water and vegetation cover but also enough territory to support the deer and pigs that they eat and the plants that the deer and pigs eat in turn. That's why there aren't and never have been all that many tigers around. Today there are only about 6,000 wild tigers on the planet, mostly in India and Southeast Asia. It sounds like a lot, but even after 30 years of efforts by conservationists the tiger is endangered. An ecologist, he worked for the Smithsonian in Nepal, then for the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia and Bangladesh, and eventually returned to work at the Zoo in 1983.