Tiger Tiger in my soup!

The Pioneer , Sunday, August 20, 2006
Correspondent : Staff Reporter
The need of the hour is to fiercely protect the world’s last tigers, not sacrifice them at the altar of economics, says Prerna Singh Bindra

How would you like to see your Royal Bengal Tiger? Watch him free and wild in the forest, the true king of beasts? Or have him chopped into pieces and boiled in a soup? Minced and ground into a pill, perhaps? Or behind bars, posing with pigs for tourists?

In case your conscience pricks, relax. You can delude yourself into believing that the tiger that went into your soup made the supreme sacrifice, and part of the money from his death will keep the flame of the dying alive. That the money made from tigers farmed for their bones and blood will be poured into the conservation of wild tigers. Or so Barun Mitra would have us believe.

In an article titled “Burning Bright in India Today”, and an editorial “Sell the Tiger to Save It” in the New York Times, Mitra enthuses about the Chinese way of saving tigers, that is, the use of free market principles to conserve the animal. It’s a win-win situation, believes the author — you improve the survival chances of a long-endangered species while giving the economy a boost.

So here’s how the China method works: Breed tigers in “tiger farms”, akin to poultry farms where battery hens are raised to be slaughtered. Mitra attempts to impress with economics: One farmed tiger could fetch thousands of dollars — about $40,000 or more. The retail value of its derivatives — claws, penis, whiskers, bones — may raise three or four times that amount. An adult tiger leaves about 12 kg bones, apart from other derivatives. Of course, live tigers have a market too, to be sold to zoos and menageries.

The tiger, it is argued, is a valuable animal, and, the argument goes, let’s be pragmatic and see it as a product. Demands are opportunities, not threats. Really, Mr Mitra? How then do you explain the fact that it is the demand for tiger bones which has been singularly responsible in recent years for decimating wild tiger populations? And no, the theory that captive tigers will meet this demand and hence take the pressure off their more fortunate wild brethren is a no-brainer and has been proved wrong, as explained in greater detail below.

Mitra writes that over the past decade, special tiger breeding bases have been set up in China both under public and private domain with 4,000 tigers being in captivity. Apparently, the Chinese have perfected the art of breeding tigers, and given a free hand, say forest authorities, they can “produce” one lakh tigers in the next decade or so. Tigers. To be harvested for their bones. Condemned to live in cages, bred like rabbits, waiting to die, so that they can be cut and chopped for their bones, whiskers and penises for use in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

There is no mention of wild tigers in the conservation plan. China has barely managed to save 25 of these — a biologically unviable population. Once a country rich in tigers, most of them were poached and brewed into soups and ground into pills for traditional cures.

The most serious threat to wild tigers remains the demand for bones and other derivatives. It is well established that the tigers in Sariska were slaughtered for skin and bone trade. The same story is being repeated in other reserves across India — Ranthambhore, Buxa, Panna — and legitimising the trade will only serve to give it further impetus. Three of the original eight tiger species are already extinct, and experts believe that the next to go will be the South China tiger. And the ones in India will follow if we don’t stop the tiger trade — now.

One trusts Mitra was a truly honoured guest at a junket when he waxes eloquent on China experimenting with re-wilding techniques (excuse me while I laugh out loud — “re-wilding techniques”?) in South Africa. South Africa, with no history of wild tigers, is the beacon of hope, with two tigers who romp with their owner and are fed their daily meat while pompous, dollar-paying tourists take pictures.

Mitra prattles on — China will in a decade have a population of one lakh tigers to meet the demand for bones and these tigers being the sacrificial lambs, selling their bones will help raise funds to “save” wild tigers. China is of course the shining light, the brave new country which will lead the world in tiger conservation, and India, insists Mitra, should behave like a tiger and join China.

I am so enraged that I am almost rendered speechless, left flabbergasted that one could be so seduced by China’s ridiculous self-serving, hare-brained scheme, that I do not know where, and how, to begin countering the case so eloquently, and so foolishly, presented in the article.

Firstly, there is absolutely no conservation value to tigers bred like rabbits in poultry-type conditions. Tigers born and bred in cages cannot hunt, mate, breed, and do all that tigers do to flourish in the wild. This is a scientific fact, established by scientists and tiger behavourists. Carnivores bred in captivity are not only incapable of thriving in wild habitats, but are also suspect carriers of diseases that threaten wild populations. Any wild ideas of farm tigers being rehabilitated in their natural habitat is just that: wild.

Bones from farmed tigers do not take the heat off wild populations and in fact do just the opposite. For one, there is no forensic test to distinguish the bones of farmed tigers from those poached from the wild, leaving the door wide open for traffickers to “launder” bones from wild tigers and cash in on the reopening of any legal market. Currently, any trade in tiger products is illegal under the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). If given a legal stamp, a black market for the wild product would flourish, and kill the remaining wild tiger population. There are just too few wild tigers — barely 5,000 — to experiment with illogical schemes.

Then again, as the writer worries, raising a captive tiger is expensive business, while killing one may cost less than one US dollar. Simply put, it is far more lucrative to kill tigers for their bones than go through the expensive business of tiger farms. The wild product will always be cheaper. Moreover, if he had bothered to study the demand, he would know that those who drink tiger blood want the “champagne” of medicines found in the bones of wild tigers. Moreover, it is the penis of a wild tiger that is believed boost impotent souls, not one of a tame cat raised in a zoo, or so say the soothsayers. The idea behind consuming a tiger derivative is to imbibe the animal’s properties. And the fact is, tiger-part substitutes are available in China, but this has not dampened the demand for tiger products.

Currently, if there is any move to reopen the tiger trade, there is a potential market of 1.2 billion consumers in the world’s fastest growing economy, and I need not elucidate the impact this would have on the last wild tigers of the world.

Nor has the farming of endangered species saved its wild populations. There are crocodile farms in China, and hardly any in the wild. Bears are milked for bile in the cruelest manner possible in farms, yet they continue to be poached for their bile and gall bladder across South-east Asia and even the US, and are today critically endangered. Not only that, there is also trade in live bear cubs to stock the bile farms.

Tiger bone has been banned from use in TCM in China since 1993, and has also been removed from the list of ingredients in the official Chinese pharmacopoeia. All legal manufacturing of medicines containing tiger bones was stopped at that time. Current research in China has found that tiger bones are similar to dog and pig bones, but the appeal of the tiger bone is not based on reality — it is more rooted in blind faith and the imagination of the consumer.

The international TCM industry, represented by the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies in Beijing, is not supporting tiger farming or the reopening of trade in tiger bone. Tiger bone is not essential to human healthcare according to the global TCM industry.

It may interest Mr Mitra to note that tiger farms already exist, mainly in Thailand. Only, they are euphemistically called “tiger zoos”, and most are suspected of laundering live tigers and tiger derivatives under the thin veneer of captive breeding centres. Tigers are displayed in cages, cuddling up with pigs, posing with tourists. I visited one such farm many years ago in Thailand and found that the sex ratio was skewed: there was barely a male for over 20 females, and while this was confirmed by the staff, proof was hard to come by. But the staff admitted, off the record, that while females had their uses as breeding machines — they were mated every six months, while in the wild, a tigress looks after her young for two years before she is ready to mate again — the males were more valuable dead than alive.

Logic defies the free market model for tiger “conservation”, but besides cold reason, this column is fuelled by anger — a wasted emotion, vouch the wise, unless channelled judiciously. Emotions, too, I am told are passe: it is economics that rules the roost, and ordains the ways of the world.

But forgive me if I have allowed both to creep in as I vent my ire, air my disbelief at the utter folly of an idea that advocates tigers as products, to be priced and sold, if they are to be saved. The idea of farming tigers may serve the gods of profit, may eventually become a lucrative business, but only over the graves of wild tigers.

If this is the current conservation model, my argument is, it is not a conservation model at all but a business one. Make it an out and out business proposition and drop the holier-than-thou conservation cloak it dons. Killing captive tigers for their bones may make profits, but it doesn’t save wild tigers and their habitat.

The only point on which I agree with Barun Mitra is when he attacks India for its failure to save the tiger, for one cannot stress enough her lack of commitment to protect the tiger from the twin, and insidious, threats of poaching and habitat loss. But to say that India should experiment and “behave like a tiger and bravely join China” is too hideous a threat, too dangerous an idea. For all its failures, and there are far too many, at least we attempt to protect the tiger in the wild. It is our national animal, one we take pride in.

Tigers are just that one step away from extinction. The twin threats of poaching and loss of habitat have taken a severe toll. India’s population is facing its worst crisis ever — an optimistic estimate barely suggests 2,000 tigers survive in India — and as tigers fall in park after park, protection is what will save the tiger. The need of the hour is to fiercely protect the world’s last tigers, not sacrifice them at the altar of economics.

I am aware that emotions are not supposed to rule conservation, but do we only want the tiger for its bones? Is that all it means to us, bones to cure arthritis, penises to boost impotent souls, whiskers as treatment for fever? Do we want to see him not as the king of beasts, but as a mere shadow of himself, a prisoner? Or would we rather have him in his kingdom, master of all he surveys, the supreme predator, and our guardian angel, for it’s our wild tiger population that indicates a healthy forest, from which flow many of our major rivers. And the elixir of life — water.

 
SOURCE : The Pioneer, Sunday, August 20, 2006
 


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