The Year of the Tiger is to help the Tiger!
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.
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.
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.
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.