Bred for the freezer: how zoo rears tigers like battery hens

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Bred for the freezer: how zoo rears tigers like battery hens

 

Carcasses kept in storage as Beijing looks to lift ban on sale of exotic animal

parts

 

In pictures: China's battery farm for rare species

 

Jonathan Watts in Guilin

Friday April 13, 2007

The Guardian

 

Captive-bred big cats await their ultimate fate at the Xiongsen farm.

Photograph: Jonathan Watts

 

The padlocked freezer at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village attracts

little attention from the tourists who throng to the park each day.

Most are more interested in the bloody spectacle of tigers savaging live cows,

the monkey bicycle race or the highwire displays by bears and goats. But it is

the freezer rather than the freak shows that will soon be at the centre of a

fierce international debate on the trade in endangered species.

 

Xiongsen is the world's biggest battery farm for rare animals. Located just

outside the southern Chinese city of Guilin, it is smaller than Regent's Park

but holds 1,300 tigers - almost as many as the whole of India - as well as

hundreds of bears, lions and birds.

The stock is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in China, where consumers pay

high prices for remedies, tonics and aphrodisiacs made from rare species. But

until now the park has only been able to bank its assets in cold storage because

of a ban on tiger products.

 

All that could be about to change. After a decade of lobbying by Xiongsen, China

is preparing to call for a lifting of the ban. Next week it will send its first

ever delegation to the Global Tiger Forum in Kathmandu. In June, at a conference

in the Hague of signatories to the Convention on the International Trade in

Endangered Species (Cites), it is expected to push the issue. In a paper to

Cites, China says the global ban has failed to halt the decline of the wild

tiger population, despite a cost of £2bn to the Chinese economy and damage to

China's traditions and medicinal culture.

 

Conservation groups warn that relaxing the ban could be disastrous. According to

the World Wildlife Fund there are only 3,500 tigers left in the wild, compared

with more than 6,000 in captivity. " This move could mean the end of wild tigers

for China and could mean the extinction of many other tiger populations in

Asia, " said Grace Gabriel, Asian regional director of the International Fund for

Animal Welfare.

 

In China the transformation of this jungle predator into a caged farm animal is

even more dramatic. From several thousand in the 1950s there are now only 50

left in the wild. The Amur tiger of north-eastern China is the most threatened

subspecies in the world. The captive population has exploded - at Xiongsen alone

it has surged from 12 in 1992 to 1,300 today.

 

To conservationists, though, it is anything but a success story. Hu Hongfu of

Traffic, a monitoring group linked to the World Wildlife Fund, says the park is

breeding more tigers to blackmail the Chinese government and the international

community. " Xiongsen is the worst of the tiger farms. It is run by individuals

who breed for money. We have advised them to stop because more tigers means more

problems, but they keep breeding because it puts pressure on the government to

lift the ban. "

 

Monkeys on camels

 

The park is part farm, part zoo and part circus. Its nursery is the start of a

production line that churns out hundreds of tigers each year and ends in the

freezer packed with carcasses. In between, most animals spend their lives in

hundreds of tiny cages that are lined up in rows around the perimeter wall, each

jammed with as many as four animals, which lie around listlessly or pace back

and forth between wire and concrete.

 

More fortunate beasts share a few football pitch-sized enclosures in the main

visitor area. Others are trained to perform in the Dream Theatre - a circus

where they jump through flaming hoops - or in an outdoor show that also has

monkeys riding camels and a bear cycling across a highwire without a safety net.

 

For most of the hundreds of tourists who come each day the most memorable part

of their visit is feeding time, when a tiger is released into a pen with live

cattle. Earlier this week tourists gasped but watched in fascination as the

predator chased down a cow, sinking its teeth and claws into its victim, which

cried and defecated in pain and fear.

 

The bloody spectacle lasted 15 minutes before the tiger - too domesticated to

kill its prey in such a short time - meekly returned to its cage and the wounded

cow was taken away for slaughter by zookeepers. Guides say the mini-hunt is

exercise for animals that will one day be released. But this is dismissed as

nonsense by conservationists, who say no animal from Xiongsen will ever be fit

for the wild.

 

" This is a farm that speed-breeds as many tigers as possible so that they can

make them into products for sale, " said Ms Gabriel. " Their genetic purity is

compromised. If they were mistakenly released into the wild they would pollute

the wild population. "

 

A keeper still with blood on his hands from dragging the wounded cow to the

abattoir said the park was hoping for a resumption of the tiger trade. " Every

part of the animal is valuable, but we can't sell them at the moment because it

is forbidden by law. One or two tigers die every year. We put them in freezers,

where they will stay until the government gives us permission to sell. "

 

The business-first philosophy of the park is evident everywhere. The restaurant

offers a dish of " conquering king " - the classical term for tiger - for 500 yuan

(£33), along with lion, crocodile, peacock, snake, bear and civet cat.

" Everything comes from our park, " said the waitress. " We don't say what the

ingredients are. You must use your imagination. " But the ban has clearly hurt

the park. The keepers say they struggle to get by on monthly income of 500 yuan

- less than most migrant labourers earn in factories or building sites. Office

managers say they have not been paid for more than three months.

 

" The ban has really hurt our business, " said Bai Wenqiang, the sales manager.

" Our boss's original plan was to make a park that would sustain people's health,

keep more tigers alive and help the environment. But since we started we have

lost 400m yuan. "

 

" We believe international law allows trade in animals that have been reared by

man for three generations. It is only the domestic law that prevents us now. We

understand the Chinese government is under a lot of international pressure. They

don't help us. But they don't give us trouble. "

 

Backstory

 

China has been using tigers for medicinal purposes for 5,000 years and a single

animal can be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The bones, used in tonics,

are the most valuable part: the 25kg (55lb) yielded by the average tiger can

fetch 2.4m yuan (£160,000), about 10 times the price of a pelt. At the Xiongsen

park, sales assistants proffer tiger-shaped bottles of bone-strengthening wine

for about £60. Each drop, they claim, is distilled in vats containing the paws

of the animal, which - if proven - would be a contravention of domestic and

international law: China banned the sale of tiger products in 1993. Tigers are

not the only exotic species prized for medicinal value. A shop in Guilin

showcases dessicated seahorses for breast cancer, dog penises for virility, deer

hooves for arthritis, baby snakes for sore throat and ant lotions for beriberi.

One rheumatism medicine has a picture of a tiger on the packet, but the only

animal ingredient listed is powdered leopard bone.

 

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