With a unique set of stripes for camouflage, and the strongest bite and most body mass

of any big cat, tigers are perfectly built for a life of stealthy, brutal nighttime ambushes

in the jungle, consuming about 150 pounds worth of prey each week.

And yet, today, there are just about as many of these apex predators pacing the backyards

of Texas as there are roaming the wild in the whole rest of the world.

That’s partly because there’s no law against owning a tiger in Texas, as long as you’ve

got 300 square feet of space and an eight-foot fence.

And apparently, Texans are really enthusiastic about the idea of owning a charismatic - deadly

- predator.

Only a few hundred owners have officially registered their pets with the state, but

rescue shelters field so many calls from distressed Texans who are either going broke buying cat

food, or are worried about becoming cat food themselves, that experts estimate the actual

Texan tiger population to be around 3,000.

Tiger researchers in Asia have used camera traps to come up with roughly the same estimate

for the wild tiger population.

But while the number of wild tigers continues to decline – due to both poaching and a

decrease in prey – the captive Texan tigers will most likely keep multiplying.

Not only are the cultural climate and actual climate right for exotic pet ownership, but

tigers – unlike other endangered megafauna – actually breed really well in captivity.

And it’s because of all that food - even in a small enclosure, a well-fed female can

give birth to more than a dozen cubs a year, several times more than her wild relatives.

At the rate they’re disappearing from the forests of Asia and popping up in the backyards

of America, tigers may soon go from being a symbol of wildness to being yet another

sign that everything really is bigger in Texas.

Speaking of felines, we wanted to introduce you to the cats of MinuteEarth.

Neko, Paka, Waffles, and Yardley often make cameos in our team meetings and occasionally

contribute to scripts by lounging on our keyboards.

And from all the cats AND people of MinuteEarth, we want to say a huge thank you to the sponsor

of this video: the University of Minnesota, where students, faculty and staff across all

fields of study are working to solve the Grand Challenges facing society.

University of Minnesota professor J.L. David Smith and his students, including Anup Joshi

have been studying tigers in the wild for more than 25 years.

Their CLAWS Lab has helped document the poaching, habitat loss and inbreeding that are hurting

wild tiger populations in Asia.

But they’ve got some good news too: people banding together in Nepal to restore community

forests are not only producing more wood for themselves but are creating more habitat for

deer – and for the tigers that prey on them.

Thanks, University of Minnesota!