This article is about the systematic abuse of tigers in east and south-east Asia in the interests of financial profit proving that tigers are today more valuable dead than alive. It is a total breakdown in the human-tiger relationship. What hope for tiger conservation?
Pink tiger bone jewellery
Pink tiger bone jewellery is, as you might expect, made from tiger bone which is pink in colour. And where might you think the pink coloration comes from? Blood. And the reason why there is blood in the bone, in this horror story jewellery, is because the bones have been extracted from living tigers while they are sedated. Yes, tigers are being deboned when they are alive. You could not imagine it if you hadn’t read about it. It is the ultimate form of tiger abuse. It is sick and a complete abdication of humankind’s responsibilities as guardians of the planet and nature. It is a pervertion of human behaviour. This horror story occurs in Laos. Shame on all those involved in this desparately immoral behaviour.
Tiger bone as a brooch
Tiger farms are huge businesses
Simon Evans, the principal lecturer in Ecotourism at Anglia Ruskin University spent more than a decade visiting tiger farms in four countries in east and southeast Asia. He’s written an article for the yahoo.com website in which he summarises his findings of tiger abuse and exploitation in these countries. I go over them briefly below. Before I do so I’d like to mention a film is about to be aired called The Tiger Mafia.
There is a video trailing the film, which you can see below. The film is made by Karl Ammann and producer Laurin Merz. I don’t think that there is a link between their work and the work of Simon Evans, who I’ve mentioned above, except that they are reporting on the same topic, the gruesome scale of the tiger trade.
Tigers are a money making product. Businesses in countries in east and southeast Asia are turning the tiger into a factory product. Their actions are reducing the tiger from a once magnificent and impressive animal to a product which is worth more dead than alive. When is the world going to try and stop this behaviour? Surely it is time to do something to stop the systematic abuse of tigers in tiger farms across these Asian countries? What about sanctions, financial penalties? I realise that this is a cultural issue and governments are loathe to get involved in another country’s culture. But this is also about the planet. Tiger farms debase the tiger and make them a nuisance in the wild.
Tiger farms undermine tiger conservation. Wild tiger parts from poached tigers are merged with farmed animals.
For me, it’s a scandal that the world accepts it. This is the world’s most iconic wild species and the way they are abused is absolutely shocking. As mentioned, the tiger has been reduced to big business and tiger farms are indeed big business. The people who run these businesses constantly innovate and one innovation is the pink tiger bone jewellery mentioned.
Female tigers are the beginning of the production line of cubs. Once they are worn out they are consigned to the “harvesting stage”. This means that they are killed and their body parts harvested. Tiger bone wine is very popular in which the bones are crushed into a powder and used to make wine. There is also market for eyeballs, whiskers, penises, claws and teeth and of course the skin. Every part of a tiger has a financial value and as I recall a tiger penises are worth about USD6000 an item. Tiger bone wine is thought to treat arthritis, impotence and rheumatism. The whole tiger body part food business is riddled with superstitious nonsense. There is nothing scientific to support it. It is tiger abuse based on superstition, the worst kind of animal cruelty in my view.
Cubs are quickly removed from their mothers so that she can go back into heat. The cubs are then exploited in visitor attraction areas where they can be cuddled and bottle-fed and photographed with tourists. Eventually these cubs, when they grow up, will be harvested for their body parts. That’s why they are worth more dead than alive. But of course while there are alive they might as well earn some money for these greedy insensitive and callous bastards.
When tigers are bred for their bones they are almost starved to death because why feed them and waste money? And when they are bred for their meat they are pumped full of liquid and forced to feed to make them obese and therefore more valuable. The carcasses are valued by their weight alone. Many of these overfed tigers can barely stand while their stomachs scrape along the ground.
There are an estimated 8,000 tigers held captive in a large number of tiger farms across China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. They often exist in appalling conditions, in Spartan concrete enclosures where there simply isn’t enough space to even exercise. There are an estimated 3,500 wild tigers on the planet but the ‘experts’ don’t really know the true population size as they are hard to count and there is a certain amount of apathy.
