With around 4000 wild tigers, efforts are on to secure the last remaining source populations and recovering tigers range wide. At Panthera, our focus is on securing source populations from the most serious threats (i.e. the poaching of tigers and their prey). Our efforts highlight how safeguarding habitats need more than just “boots on the ground”. Efforts are also on to expand breeding cores through recovery efforts. Through a few cases, I highlight key factors that facilitate recovery of tiger populations and by assessing the recovery potential of multiple sites across the tigers range, confirm that significant recoveries are possible but are contingent on prey recovery, which is a slow process. From these experiences, I show how the ambitious commitment made by the heads of 13 tiger range countries in 2010 to doubling tiger populations by 2022 may be ecologically unrealistic. Finally, I discuss how an overt emphasis on tiger enumeration (spurred by these global endeavours) is increasingly limiting research in the field to estimating numbers, which may seriously impede conservation of this endangered species.