Plight of the Tiger
Tigers, Panthera Tigris , the largest of all living felids, have for millennia inspired awe and terror and been a living symbol of power and virility throughout their native Asia. Unfortunately the tiger’s association with fertility has contributed to its demise, as demand for tiger based medicines today represents the most significant pressure on wild tiger populations -- fuelling the relentless poaching which now threatens to wipe tigers off the face of the earth and forever consign them to textbooks, museums, and fading memories. Despite a complete absence of empirical evidence and the existence of other, more effective treatments, many in Asia still seek tiger penis soup for the cure of impotence, believing that by consuming the progenitive organs of such a magnificent beast they will be filled with his vigor. Additionally, tiger bone (Hu Gu), in the form of pills or wine, is a much coveted remedy for arthritis and rheumatism in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). |
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Tigers are being slaughtered, butchered for this and other tiger-derived medicines and souvenirs. The trade in tiger parts represents the ignominious end to one of the most beautiful and revered animals in natural history. Having once ranged over almost the whole of Asia, from the Caspian sea to the India ocean to the Yellow sea in a one great orange and black swath of interconnected and genetically healthy populations, today tigers are confined to small patches of geographically and genetically isolated subspecies each struggling to maintain a viable population while often forced to compete with humans for resources and dodge poachers’ bullets. Even in India, which has perhaps the most serious and ambitious tiger preservation program in Asia, poachers have devastated the tigers in the national preserves.
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Many tigers have suffered the great misfortune to live in parts of the world where political structures all too often consist of right wing military dictatorships such as Myanmar (formerly Burma) or communist dictatorships such as China and Vietnam. In countries which are materially poor and where the rule of law is absent or tenuous at best, people are desperate, prohibitions are porous, and the preservation of an endangered species falls low on the list of priorities for both the populace and the bureaucracy.
Tigers’ size and power--reaching lengths of up ten feet (including their tails), and weights regularly up to five hundred pounds and in at least one case eight hundred pounds -- and the fact that they have been known to prey on humans, has made them an irresistible target for hunters. Just as consuming tiger parts makes one as virile as a tiger, killing a tiger makes one as powerful, perhaps more powerful than the most fearsome of all wild hunters. Tigers were hunted by the British in India (often in “canned” hunts wherein a single tiger was trapped, surrounded and then “hunted” by a British nobleman or official shooting from the safety of an elephant’s back) by Soviet soldiers from the near-by base at Vladivostock in Siberia, and by the Chinese.[3] The Amur (Siberian) tiger suffered years of devastation and neglect in the Soviet Union until the nineteen-eighties when the Soviets belatedly began to take step to protect them, only to be devastated again when the USSR collapsed and Russia slipped into cleptocracy – where anything could be had for a price including the skins and bones of Siberian tigers.
Declared an “enemy of the People” by Mao Tse Tung, tigers -- once plentiful in China -- were slaughtered to the point of near-extinction to make room for collective farms and state directed repopulations. This state sponsored extermination not only brought the South China subspecies to the brink of annihilation, it also, paradoxically, furnished a bountiful reservoir of tiger parts for use in TCM and folk medicine thereby both whetting the appetite of the Chinese people for tiger-derived medicines, and creating the illusion that tiger parts were a plentiful and inexhaustible resource. When this reserve of tiger carcasses dried up sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, the Chinese were forced to look elsewhere for re-supply, which led to an increase in poaching of tiger populations in India and Sumatra.
Tigers are an important national and cultural folk symbol and the PRC continues to claim that it harbors extant tigers. Unfortunately, the tigers in Chinese zoos are hopelessly in-bred and therefore worthless for breeding. Despite China’s aggressive P.R. campaign and their claim to have developed a long term plan for the survival of the South China tiger in protected areas, recent attempts to find evidence of habitation in the wild by even a single tiger have not been encouraging. There is debate now among experts as to whether there are any tigers left in the wild in China. According to Wang Menghu, the deputy secretary-general of the China Zoo Protection association, the last wild South China tiger was shot by poachers in 1994[5]. Tigers’ genetic health is in peril and the eschatology seems inescapable. The total world population of wild tigers, today perhaps less then five thousand, represents a dangerously thin stock of hereditary information especially when one considers the much smaller populations of each surviving subspecies: Bengal, Indochinese, Siberian, and Sumatran and the near-extinct South Chinese. The three other subspecies: the, Caspian, Javan, and Balinese are all now extinct— either completely eliminated or reduced to such low levels as to be walking ghosts; destined for oblivion.
The total numbers today for the various subspecies are[6]:
Trade in tiger parts was officially made illegal by the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)[7]. More recently, the 1998 Rhinoceros and Tiger Product Labeling Act prohibits "the sale, importation and exportation of products intended for human consumption or application containing or labeled or advertised as containing, any substance derived from any species of rhinoceros or tiger".[8] However, in most countries which either maintain wild tiger populations (such as Russia, Myanmar and Vietnam) or represent large markets for tiger parts (such as China, Taiwan and the United States) few resources have been allocated toward enforcement and prosecution of offenders. If the poaching does not stop, if tigers are not seriously and permanently protected world-wide, the genetic diversity of captive tiger populations --despite the valiant and crucial hard work of captive breeding programs -- will be insufficient to maintain the species and the world will lose one of the most beautiful and inspiring beasts in all of natural history.
© 2002 Forever Tigers
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