The Tiger

Vietnam's tiger conservation efforts has arrived too late with just 5 wild tigers in the country! The video explains why Vietnamese people should think about tiger conservation and refuse to buy tiger glue among other tiger products. Tigers were plentiful in Vietnam. Now there are five in the wild. That's almost as good as saying they are extinct in the wild in Vietnam. The video is good. I like it. But it's too late and the Vietnamese are engaged in a particularly obnoxious kind of speciesism concerning one species: the cat. Their culture allows them to eat domestic cats after a brutal death and yet there is a big push to save the tiger. As I said this is speciesism and it is illogical to me. It is remarkable that so many products are made from tiger body parts many based on unsubstantiated superstition. Killing tigers for body part products is killing them for no reason at all. It is just self-indulgent nonsense. Education for Nature - Vietnam says that the remaining five...

NEWS AND COMMENT: I know that the majestic tiger is nothing to the British government. The tiger's gradual extinction in the wild is not on Boris Johnson's radar. Never has been. BUT I am sure Carrie Symonds, his fiancée, has considered the abuse of the tiger by four Asian countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos and as such here is a real opportunity to add some conditions to the trade links that Britain wants to develop with China and neighbouring countries.   British PM needs to think of the tiger when pushing trade links with China. This is a tiger farm. Gross animal abuse. Cruel. These tigers will soon be killed and their body parts harvested. Pic in the public domain. I recently wrote about the abuses dished out to the tiger by these countries  - click to read it . If anyone cares about animal welfare it is horrendous. For example, deboning living tigers to make pink tiger bone jewellery. Can you believe it?  It is truly time to tackle tiger abuse and ex...

Tiger bone glue “is very strong in enhancing your masculinity". It is another one of those rather bizarre products that you can buy in Asia created out of tiger bone. There are other products created from the body parts of tigers, a highly endangered species , in part because some people in Asia like to eat bits of it. This is where you get your tiger bone glue comes from! Tiger bone glue is particularly odd to me because you would have thought that you would stick things together with it. No, you eat it. A lot of tiger products are geared up to improve masculinity. Perhaps the most notable is the tiger penis . A whole one is worth about $6000 (the last time I checked).  I have no idea how this is eaten. It is probably ground up and put into something or other and then consumed. The market in tiger bone products is very lucrative . One 10th of a kilogram (about one fifth of a pound) of tiger bone glue costs about $140. Because the market is so lucrative is open to corrupti...

I would like, briefly, to talk about tiger bone. In fact, any part of the tiger will do. Pretty much every part of the tiger has a value and some parts are extremely expensive. It is all about supply and demand. The tiger's bones are ground down for tiger bone wine. It is also used in a number of medicinal concoctions that are claimed to treat such things as: fright, dysentery and ulcers. It is also used to ward off the devil if you have a bath in it. The extinction of the South China tiger is substantially due to the market in tiger bones. Tiger farms in China produce the tigers and sell the wine. The tiger is subject to market forces. It is a product. Tiger Product Price $ USD per Kg Place Date Bone 130 Nepal 2002 Bone 130-175 ...

I have said that the South China tiger subspecies ( Panthera tigris amoyensis ) is totally extinct - captive or wild . That may be a rash statement but it is based on sensible thought and real information. As at 2002, on the publication of the Sunquist's renown Wild Cats Of The World , of the five-remaining subspecies of the tiger (I say it's four now) the South China tiger was the most endangered. Tiger farm - Photo by International Tiger Coalition The decline in population was rapid at the end. In 1949 it was thought that there were 4,000 individuals. However, this fantastic animal was "declared a pest" and mercilessly persecuted. I can understand one aspect of this. The tiger is hard to live with because it is a very large and a potentially dangerous animal. Humankind has great difficulty sharing the planet with it. But the main reason for its decline is Chinese medicine. Please note that I am not being judgemental. I am simply describing what has gone o...