Tuesday May 29, 2007
Reduced to meat and wine
IN China, rampant trade has shrunk the wild tiger population to only about 50 cats. Captive breeding was consequently hailed as the solution to save the species. In recent years, however, animal rights advocates have lamented the conditions in China’s 20 privately owned tiger farms, and have argued for their closure.
The International Fund For Animal Welfare (IFAW) in a September 2006 report Made in China on illegal tiger bone trade, said: “... numerous zoos, wildlife parks and tiger farms in China breed and keep hundreds of tigers, often in abhorrent conditions. Many of the facilities stockpile tiger carcasses in the hope that legalised tiger trade one day will be reopened. Defying the domestic trade ban issued by China’s State Council, several of these facilities have already started selling tiger bone wine.”
At the biggest farms, busloads of visitors are driven around with tame tigers following behind. In some farms, tourists drive through enclosures and dangle live chickens from car windows to bait the big cats. In others, visitors watch tigers shred cows dumped out of passing trucks.
And tiger meat is on the menu in these parks, either stir-fried or stewed, and washed down with a glass or two of wine made from tiger bones.
The IFAW finds none of the facilities met international standards set for conservation breeding programmes. Their operations were aimed at commercial purposes, evidenced by the sales of entrance tickets, entertainment shows and products made from wildlife bred in the facilities.
Since 1993, China has banned domestic tiger trade and the use of tiger bone in traditional Chinese, in line with the global prohibition under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species but recent investigations indicate that illicit commerce in tiger parts is growing, and much of it occurs at tiger farms.
In February, Beijing-based Independent Television News reported that DNA tests confirmed that Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village near Guilin served tiger meat at its restaurant. Last August, China Youth Daily reported that the same tiger farm, China’s biggest, was making tiger bone wine. Its cellar had over 400 vats of wine, each containing a tiger carcass.
In February last year, Shanghai Wildlife Park was found collaborating with a liquor factory to produce and sell a health-tonic made of bones from tigers killed by buses carrying tourists through the park.
In December 2002, a wildlife park in Sanya, Hainan, imported 100 Bengal tigers from the Sriracha Tiger Zoo Thailand. Although wildlife officials contended that the tigers were imported for “non-commercial” purposes, a park spokesperson said the facility intended to breed the tigers so that consumers could “taste tiger meat.”
Thai investigations later found the import to be illegal, and the Thai facility has neither a breeding permit nor papers to confirm the origin of 218 tigers in its possession then.
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