Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 10 Feb 10;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Conservationists appealed Wednesday for an end to the commercial tiger trade, warning that demand in China, Southeast Asia -- but also the United States -- was threatening the big cats with extinction.
Environmental campaigners see 2010 as crucial to spread their message as East Asian nations celebrate the Year of the Tiger and Russia prepares to hold a summit on tiger conservation in September in Vladivostok.
Only some 3,200 tigers remain in the wild, nearly half of them in India, down from 100,000 worldwide a century ago due to burgeoning human populations and a demand in China, Vietnam and Laos for tiger parts in folk medicine.
But environmental campaigners said the problem was not just in Asia. They worried about the United States, where more than 5,000 tigers are believed to be in private hands as backyard pets or roadside zoo attractions.
Crawford Allan, director of North America operations at the conservation program Traffic, said an investigation had found tiger-breeding farms akin to puppy mills help meet the demand.
With tigers often too dangerous to handle after six months old, they risk exploitation after they outgrow their usefulness, Allan said. He voiced alarm that some US restaurants have sold tiger meat as an exotic dish.
"The US needs to take action," Allan told reporters on a conference call. "It is virtually impossible in some states to know where tigers are, how many there are and if they're being sucked into a trafficking black hole."
While 26 states ban private ownership of tigers, nine states -- including North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin -- have no regulations at all, he said.
The highest number of captive tigers are found in Texas, which has regulations on tiger ownership but rarely enforces them, according to Allan.
Conservationists have largely applauded the Chinese government's efforts to stamp out the tiger trade, but they warned that a growing private industry of tiger farms in Asia was putting new pressure on the endangered species.
Chinese authorities said this week that the country had nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity and could breed 1,000 more every year as part of an effort to increase the animals' population.
But tiger supporters warn that more animals are being bred in underground farms and have vowed to fight any push to legalize them.
"This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon for the survival of wild tigers," said Keshav Varma, project director of the World Bank's Global Tiger Initiative.
"Once this becomes a business, it can have a perverse effect on markets by stimulating and sustaining demand."
He said a rise of the middle class in China and other nations was also leading to new demand for tiger parts -- not just for local medicines or wines, but also for tiger skins used as ornamental gifts.
Huang Lixin, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco, said doctors would campaign throughout the year to warn of the risks to the animal population and distance themselves from the use of tiger parts.
"I think the Year of the Tiger is a tremendous opportunity for us to reach the Chinese public as well as the world Chinese community," Huang said.
Asian Affluence Endangers World Tiger Population
Deborah Zabarenko, PlanetArk 11 Feb 10;
WASHINGTON - Demand by a newly rich Asian population for such goods as tiger bone tonic wine and tigers' skin, meat and teeth is putting pressure on these endangered creatures worldwide, wildlife advocates reported on Wednesday.
Because of this increased Asian demand for tiger products, tiger farms in Asia are breeding the animals for their body parts, even though there is a ban on this trade in Asia, said Crawford Allan, Director of TRAFFIC-North America, which monitors such illicit commerce in animal products.
"Some of the spending of (new Asian) wealth is on symbols of status and traditional products that were previously out of reach, and some of those include endangered species like the tiger." Allan said in an online briefing.
"Tiger bone tonic wine has become a fashionable cocktail to serve among these nouveau riches, particularly in countries like China," he said.
The United States is also part of the problem, Allan and other conservation leaders said in the briefing, because the U.S. captive tiger population of 5,000 animals is larger than the estimated 3,200 wild tigers in the world.
Many U.S. tigers are bred for entertainment purposes or for private collections, rather than zoos. However, while a small tiger cub may be appealing, even a six-month-old tiger is too much for most private owners to handle and hundreds are turned over to sanctuaries.
What happens to them then is hard to discern because of an irregular patchwork of laws and regulations, the environmentalists said, and some may end up as part of the illegal trade in tiger parts.
YEAR OF THE TIGER
To combat this trade and the poaching and deforestation that are cutting into the number of wild tigers around the globe, the World Wildlife Fund and other environmental organizations launched a campaign to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022.
The campaign begins formally on Sunday, the start of the traditional Chinese lunar year of the tiger. The goal is to have twice as many wild tigers by the next tiger year in twelve years.
The environmental advocates plan to press their case at a series of international meetings this year, starting with a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in March in Doha, Qatar, and continuing through a September gathering specifically on tigers in Vladivostok.
For the last 12 years, experts in traditional Chinese medicine have been campaigning against the use of tiger parts, said Lixin Huang, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
"Traditional Chinese medicine does not need tiger bones to treat patients or to save lives," Huang said. "Tigers originally came from China, but China does not have many wild tigers left, only about 50."
Saving tigers means saving their disparate environments around Asia, which can also mean saving the human communities that depend on the same environments, said Sybille Klenzendorf, Director of WWF-US Species Conservation Program.
In the case of the Sumatran tiger, its peat swamp habitat acts to sequester climate-warming carbon dioxide. However this is being threatened by logging and the rise of palm oil plantations where there used to be swamps and forests.
Demand in Europe for products made from palm oil, such as lipstick, ice cream, biofuels and detergents, helps drive the destruction of tiger habitat in this region, the conservationists said.
(Editing by Vicki Allen)
