PICTURES: Tigers Butchered for Trade at "Zoos" in China?

Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park

Photograph by Mark Leong

The Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park in Guillin, China, puts on a circus-style performance in an undated photograph. Some of the park's 1,300 tigers and 400 bears perform in the daily shows.

The park is lobbying to ease regulations on China's 16-year-old ban in trading tiger parts--which would be to their benefit. Xiongsen owns a nearby distillery that produces tiger-bone wine, called the chicken soup of Chinese medicine, according to National Geographic magazine.

(See tiger pictures.)

But conservationists fear that any form of legal tiger trade would further endanger the fewer than 4,000 tigers that still roam free, the magazine reported. For instance, just as legalizing ivory sales has not helped to slow illegal poaching of elephants, legalizing tiger products may only increase demand for tiger parts--both wild and farmed, conservationists say.

December 29, 2009

Tiger Medicines

Photograph by Mark Leong

A collection of medicines claiming to contain wild animal parts (pictured in an undated photo) was acquired in Malaysia by the wildlife trade monitoring organization TRAFFIC.

Mostly of Chinese origin, the products are made mainly of tigers but also of antelope, pangolins, and other species, according to National Geographic magazine.

(Related: "PANGOLIN PHOTOS: Fetus Soup, Other 'Cures' Drive Trade.")

Exotic animal parts are also symbols of status and prosperity. Until 2005, Tibetan ceremonial robes, or chubas, were trimmed with snow leopard or otter fur, for example. And in China the rise of the middle class means that shark-fin soup, seen as a delicacy, is now being consumed by the masses, conservationists say.

December 29, 2009

Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park

Photograph by Mark Leong

A tiger sits on display at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park in an undated photograph.

Wildlife trafficking has thrived thanks to a loophole in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which allows the trade of captive animals, experts say. Many smugglers have established fake breeding facilities, where poached wild animals and plants are captive bred, according to the January 2010 National Geographic magazine article.

December 29, 2009

Contraband

Photograph by Mark Leong

Shown in an undated picture of an evidence room at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry's Police Rapid Reaction Force headquarters in Medan, a stuffed leopard and tiger—as well as rare hawksbill sea turtles, antlers, and pangolin skins—are among items confiscated over a 12-month period.

More than 13 million live animals from protected species were legally exported from Southeast Asia between 2000 and 2007, most of them going to the United States. However, legal trade dwarfs the profitable illicit market that operates in its shadow, according to the January 2010 National Geographic magazine article.

December 29, 2009