The world conservation community collectively is working to identify and preserve corridors of wild tiger habitat while relieving the misery of those who live in tiger territory and involving them directly in tiger recovery. It's long, frustrating, dangerous and expensive work, work that'll never be finished, according to John Seidensticker, chairman of the Save the Tiger Fund Council and curator of mammals at the National Zoological Park of the Smithsonian Institution. If it's true that a man can't turn his back on a tiger for fear of attack, it's even truer that he can't ever stop focusing on conserving the cat or it most certainly will blink out.

Which brings us back to filmmaker John Varty, whose focus defies that of the mainstream as he takes a pragmatic if controversial approach to damage control for tigers. His thinking is outside-the-box. His thinking is outside of Asia.

The gist of it is this: In 1999, Varty with his brother, Dave, imported a couple of captive-born Bengal cubs from Cincinnati, Ohio, to their native South Africa. Here, they set about creating the Taj Mahal of tiger sanctuaries. They reclaimed 90,000 over-farmed acres on the banks of the Gariep River and reestablished a forest. They enclosed the land with a big barrier fence. They restocked it with wild game. (As the owners of Londolozi, a 32,000-acre game reserve in South Africa praised by President Nelson Mandela as a model for conservation development, the Varty brothers are no strangers to this part of the business.)

Finally, they introduced the cubs, Ron and Julie, to a small section of the sanctuary. John Varty, with Canadian cat handler Dave Salmoni, took the cubs on walks and taught them to hunt. The hope is that these two tigers someday soon will fend for themselves and ultimately be "wild" enough to raise truly wild cubs within the sanctuary.

These second-and third-generation cats would be candidates for relocation back to Asia. Varty's idea is to export not just tigers, but the entire concept of the sanctuary. His vision is for his tiger sanctuary to serve as a model for similar sanctuaries in Asia. All the better if the genetic contributions of formerly captive tigers can someday prove valuable in increasing the diversity of the wild pool.