1. Exploitative hunting and poaching (economics rewards individuals who sell natural products to markets - the more animal pelts you can provide or trees you can chop down the more turnover and profit you can make). An example is the Flying Fox, which is hunted for food, medicine and sport.
2. Competition for land (the economic system requires humans to own something to be able to make a living out of it, so if you can't fence it you can't earn anything from it - this therefore reduces the space for those who are not economically active, like tigers and trees).
So here's a radical idea - a potential solution
If you have a picture of a tiger on your product you should pay a percentage of the value of your product or service into the international fund to help preserve that animal. The same applies if you are selling tiger teddies or toys etc.
To make this practical the funds raised would go into a central fund that would be allocated to a variety of different causes as determined by the governing body based on their expert opinion of where the prioritised needs lie.
It's a bit like an environmental tax concept, and that could be the extension of this idea. Maybe what is needed is a pilot project to be rolled out gradually until the concept is well enough proved to become an international UN driven collaborative initiative, where all countries make a contribution.
Like all regulation-like initiatives it suffers of the weakness of requiring enforcement practices, which are traditionally difficult to police and expensive to administer - but that isn't a good enough reason not to try. This is what leadership is about.
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