{"id":5956,"date":"2016-08-02T07:38:21","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T11:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5956"},"modified":"2016-08-02T11:32:10","modified_gmt":"2016-08-02T15:32:10","slug":"blood-of-the-tiger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5956","title":{"rendered":"****Blood of the Tiger"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_5957\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5957\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5957\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Tiger.jpg?resize=584%2C389\" alt=\"photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license\" width=\"584\" height=\"389\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Tiger.jpg?w=640&amp;ssl=1 640w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Tiger.jpg?resize=150%2C100&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Tiger.jpg?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Tiger.jpg?resize=451%2C300&amp;ssl=1 451w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-5957\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n<p>By J.A. Mills \u2013 Tigers are many people\u2019s joy and woe. Beautiful, intelligent apex predators, their numbers in the wild have diminished to a few thousand, and the forces threatening them seem irredeemably entrenched. This book lays out in stunning, infuriating detail the shortcomings and compromises in international policies toward tigers by both governmental and non-governmental organizations, even presumed good guys like the World Wildlife Fund.<\/p>\n<p>Mills\u2019s arguments are well supported by many other organizations and investigations. The nub of the problem is this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Wildlife protection efforts focus on illegal trade, ignoring the legal Asian \u201ctiger farms\u201d<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/asia_pacific\/tiger-farms-stoke-chinese-demand-for-tiger-wine-and-rugs-putting-wild-cats-in-peril\/2015\/01\/01\/6f292ea0-796b-11e4-9721-80b3d95a28a9_story.html\">\u201cTiger farms\u201d<\/a> provide a totally inappropriate environment (group cages) for solitary animals like tigers, and animals raised in them cannot survive, if released into the wild<\/li>\n<li>Proponents say tiger farms reduce pressure for poaching wild tigers, which is completely false<\/li>\n<li>The availability of tiger products from farmed animals builds demand for these products, increasing the incentive for poaching<\/li>\n<li>It is vastly cheaper to poach a tiger (about $10) than to raise it on a farm ($10 per day in food alone)<\/li>\n<li>Consumers view products from farmed tigers as inferior to those from wild-killed ones.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here is what becomes of farmed tigers in China. They are hunted in fake \u201cbig game\u201d shoots, their pelts are made into rugs and clothing, their meat is eaten (yes), their carcasses are deboned and the bones steeped in vats of wine, then sold as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3497025\/Tigers-BOILED-make-wine-Animals-starve-death-rusty-cages-China-aphrodisiac-alcohol-boosts-sex-drive.html\">\u201ctiger wine.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>All this happens behind the smoke screen of \u201cdomestic\u201d versus \u201cinternational\u201d trade, of China\u2019s 1993 ban on tiger bone products, and fake compliance with international wildlife protection regimes.<\/p>\n<p>While Mills\u2019s book gets these points across effectively, it is not very inspiring reading, as it details one failed attempt after another by international organizations and high-level conferences to \u201csave the tiger\u201d in the face of false cooperation by, primarily, Chinese government officials to do whatever they please.<\/p>\n<p>Luxury tiger goods are big business in Asia. What\u2019s true for tiger-derived products is also true for bear paws, bear bile, rhino horn, and <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2014\/08\/140818-elephants-africa-poaching-cites-census\/\">elephant ivory<\/a>. Indiscriminate killing of the latter two species puts them on the path to extinction as well. Some Chinese investors openly say they are stockpiling these animal parts for the time when the animals are extinct and the \u201cvalue\u201d of their collections will skyrocket.<\/p>\n<p>We in the United States are part of the problem. Inconsistent policies across states allow private individuals to keep wild animals, and there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwildlife.org\/stories\/more-tigers-in-american-backyards-than-in-the-wild\">more tigers in U.S. back yards than in the wild<\/a>.\u00a0 Often the conditions they are maintained in are filthy, too small, and in every respect wholly inadequate. You may recall the notorious and tragic episodes that have resulted in Jackson Township, N.J., and Zanesville, Ohio.<\/p>\n<p>I am a regular supporter of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.panthera.org\/\">Panthera<\/a>, an organization dedicated to saving the big cats <em>in the wild<\/em>. Unfortunately, even their promotional material skirts a fundamental problem, by emphasizing the fight against \u201cillegal trade,\u201d when China\u2019s tiger farms are perfectly legal. Mills supports her text with ample footnotes and a short section on \u201cwhat you can do,\u201d\u00a0 including strengthening state laws about private tiger ownership in the United States. <a href=\"http:\/\/jamillsauthor.com\/take-action\/\">Her website provides more ideas.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By J.A. Mills \u2013 Tigers are many people\u2019s joy and woe. Beautiful, intelligent apex predators, their numbers in the wild have diminished to a few thousand, and the forces threatening them seem irredeemably entrenched. This book lays out in stunning, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5956\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Blood of the Tiger - expose of shortcomings in international wildlife protection","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,126,35],"tags":[577,73,576],"class_list":["post-5956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-reading-2","category-real-life","tag-ja-mills","tag-nature","tag-tiger"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1y4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5956"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5961,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions\/5961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}