Post by Mystical Witch on Mar 1, 2007 12:08:22 GMT
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).
Many people in Asia believe that the essence of the tiger's strength, agility and wisdom can be refined from its bone and sinew, boiled into a gluey potion … and in this way, the tiger is destroyed by its own fable[1]
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.
It is my considered opinion, after more than one and a half years as Director, Project Tiger that the tiger and its ecosystem is facing its worst ever crisis. I feel that the figures of one tiger death every day may even be an underestimate and there are many reasons to say so. If out of every ten tigers poached, poisoned or crushed under the wheels of a vehicle, three are tigresses who have cubs, all the cubs will also die unnoticed because they are totally dependent on the mother. The death of three resident male tigers will result in new males occupying vacant ranges and in the first instance they will kill all cubs in order to father their own litters. Thus for every ten tigers killed, sometimes as many as fifteen additional tigers die, since this entire process completely disturbs the natural life cycle of the tiger. Such is the devastation we face.
…On the occasion of 25 years of Project Tiger, unless revolutionary steps are taken immediately, there is little hope for the future and we could be reaching a point of no return.
- P.K. Sen, Director of Project Tiger in India’s Ministry of Environment and Forest.
Quoted in: The Secret Life of Tigers by Valmik Thapar.[2]
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.
© The Tiger Foundation, 2000 - www.tigers.ca
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.
As tiger populations declined in South East Asia poaching mafias across the world had zeroed in on India to fulfill the demand for both skins and tiger bones. A new and horrific market had opened up in bones since they were used as magical cures for arthritis and rheumatism, and were converted into wines for sexual potency. Even the tiger’s penis had a price and was cooked as a soup to provide sexual prowess. These horror stories pored out. I was numb with grief at the loss of some of the most superb tigers that I had known, and it took me months to react to the tiger crisis that engulfed the world. The success of the Indian tiger meant that it had a price on its head, and the shocking part of all this was that most of this magnificent beast was ending up in man’s stomach because of the vulgar and twisted ways of human beings.
- Valmik Thapar[4]
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.
Balinese Tiger: Courtesy of Cat Specialist Group
The total numbers today for the various subspecies are[6]:
Bengal P. tigris tigris ~3000
Indochinese P. tigris corbetti ~1,200
Sumatran P. tigris sumatrae ~400
Amur P. tigris altaica ~150-300
South China P. tigris amoyensis ~0-50
Caspian P. tigris virgata Extinct
Javan P. tigris sondaica Extinct
Balinese P. tigris balica Extinct
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.
1 The Faculty of Biology, Vietnam National University Hanoi. Australia Vietnam Science-Technology Link website. coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/ong-cop/tiger.html
2 Thapar, Valmik. The Secret Life of Tigers. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. 1999
3 Matthiessen, Peter. Tigers in the Snow , Introduction and photographs by Maurice Hornocker. North Point Press, New York. 2000
4 Op. cit., Thapar, Valmik.
5 Associated Press, 1998.
6 Compiled from information on www.tigersincrisis.com and www.5tigers.org
7 www.cites.org
8 www.eia-international.org
Many people in Asia believe that the essence of the tiger's strength, agility and wisdom can be refined from its bone and sinew, boiled into a gluey potion … and in this way, the tiger is destroyed by its own fable[1]
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.
It is my considered opinion, after more than one and a half years as Director, Project Tiger that the tiger and its ecosystem is facing its worst ever crisis. I feel that the figures of one tiger death every day may even be an underestimate and there are many reasons to say so. If out of every ten tigers poached, poisoned or crushed under the wheels of a vehicle, three are tigresses who have cubs, all the cubs will also die unnoticed because they are totally dependent on the mother. The death of three resident male tigers will result in new males occupying vacant ranges and in the first instance they will kill all cubs in order to father their own litters. Thus for every ten tigers killed, sometimes as many as fifteen additional tigers die, since this entire process completely disturbs the natural life cycle of the tiger. Such is the devastation we face.
…On the occasion of 25 years of Project Tiger, unless revolutionary steps are taken immediately, there is little hope for the future and we could be reaching a point of no return.
- P.K. Sen, Director of Project Tiger in India’s Ministry of Environment and Forest.
Quoted in: The Secret Life of Tigers by Valmik Thapar.[2]
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.
© The Tiger Foundation, 2000 - www.tigers.ca
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.
As tiger populations declined in South East Asia poaching mafias across the world had zeroed in on India to fulfill the demand for both skins and tiger bones. A new and horrific market had opened up in bones since they were used as magical cures for arthritis and rheumatism, and were converted into wines for sexual potency. Even the tiger’s penis had a price and was cooked as a soup to provide sexual prowess. These horror stories pored out. I was numb with grief at the loss of some of the most superb tigers that I had known, and it took me months to react to the tiger crisis that engulfed the world. The success of the Indian tiger meant that it had a price on its head, and the shocking part of all this was that most of this magnificent beast was ending up in man’s stomach because of the vulgar and twisted ways of human beings.
- Valmik Thapar[4]
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.
Balinese Tiger: Courtesy of Cat Specialist Group
The total numbers today for the various subspecies are[6]:
Bengal P. tigris tigris ~3000
Indochinese P. tigris corbetti ~1,200
Sumatran P. tigris sumatrae ~400
Amur P. tigris altaica ~150-300
South China P. tigris amoyensis ~0-50
Caspian P. tigris virgata Extinct
Javan P. tigris sondaica Extinct
Balinese P. tigris balica Extinct
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.
1 The Faculty of Biology, Vietnam National University Hanoi. Australia Vietnam Science-Technology Link website. coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/ong-cop/tiger.html
2 Thapar, Valmik. The Secret Life of Tigers. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. 1999
3 Matthiessen, Peter. Tigers in the Snow , Introduction and photographs by Maurice Hornocker. North Point Press, New York. 2000
4 Op. cit., Thapar, Valmik.
5 Associated Press, 1998.
6 Compiled from information on www.tigersincrisis.com and www.5tigers.org
7 www.cites.org
8 www.eia-international.org