Still, I'm glad he put them in the film. My daughter is doing an extensive project on endangered species. Her subject is the tapir, particularly the Malayan tapir. She cannot find any information on the number of tapirs in existence today - or in prior years as a comparison. It's amazing that we know so little about a very large and endangered species.
Nobody knows how many Malayan tapirs are in the wild.
Our best guess at the moment is that there are 3,000-plus Malayan tapirs left in the wild and about 200 in zoos around the world. As you can see, research and conservation are both critical. There are currently no projects in Southeast Asia focused on the Malayan tapir. Funding is not readily available for tapir conservation or field research. One of the big problems in conservation of most tapir species is that so many people don't know what a tapir is.