The tiger who came for me

摘要

WE HAVE a saying here: if you see a tiger, you see your death. Death will be coming very soon." Pavel Fomenko is living proof that this is just a saying - but only just. He has been working for 30 years to conserve Siberian tigers in Russia's far east. But his most recent direct encounter was almost his last. In March, Fomenko was attending to a female tiger at a wildlife rehabilitation centre in Alekseevka, in Russia's wild and remote Primorsky province. The tiger had been captured in a village after killing dogs to feed her cubs. It was what conservationists call a "conflict tiger" - one in danger of being killed by humans. "Such a tiger should be caught and put in a rehabilitation centre," Fomenko tells me on the phone from WWF Russia's office in Vladivostok, where he is head of rare species conservation. "This tiger was put in the centre and later she had to be vaccinated. During the vaccination, an accident took place."