(CN) Guilin Tiger Farm

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Exposed: Dark secret of the farm where tigers' bodies are plundered to make £185

wine

 

By Richard Jones In Guilin, China

Last updated at 11:05 PM on 20th February 2010

 

Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy

concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His

once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur

and bones.

 

Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome

release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently,

that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which

began last Sunday.

 

'What can we do?' a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors

with a sigh and a casual shrug. 'He's dying, of course, but we have to keep

feeding him until he does. It's against the law to kill tigers.'

One of the emaciated tigers in a cage at the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear

Mountain Village in Guilin, China

 

Dying breed: One of the emaciated tigers in a cage at the Xiongshen Tiger

and Bear Mountain Village in Guilin, China

 

Instead, it seems, they die slowly of neglect. In row after row of foul,

cramped cages, more tigers lie alone, crippled and dying. One is hunched up

against the side of its cage with its neck grotesquely deformed. Another,

blinded in one eye, lies motionless.

 

This shabby, rundown park in Guilin - one of China's main tourist cities -

is home to the world's biggest single collection of tigers. Yet it is never

included on foreigners' tour itineraries.

 

For here, 1,500 captive tigers - around half as many as there are thought to

be remaining in the wild - live out miserable lives in squalid conditions.

 

Each tiger costs around £6 a day to feed, and it is easy to see that the

small clusters of visitors paying £7.50 each to wander around the cages and

watch bizarre animal shows cannot possibly cover even the cost of food for

the vast park.

 

The reason is the tigers, mostly Siberian, are far more valuable dead than

alive.

 

For a 55lb pile of bones from a single tiger can be worth up to £225,000.

There is a hugely lucrative trade in the skeletons at the Guilin park.

 

Dead tigers are driven 200 miles from the park, officially called the

Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village, to a huge subterranean complex

where their fur is stripped from their carcasses and their bones collected

to make tiger wine that can sell for £185 a bottle.

 

So for the park, where the tigers are bred for their bones, every year is

the Year of the Tiger, and conservationists fear that the vile trade could

be helping push some species of wild big cat into extinction.

 

On paper, China has signed international wildlife treaties that ban all

trade in tiger body parts and claims to have outlawed the industry.

 

In reality, Xiongshen and other parks like it operate in a grey area of the

law, using the bones of animals that have died naturally in captivity to

produce 'medicinal' wine, apparently with the government's blessing.

 

Tigers have been used in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries. Their

eyeballs are used to treat epilepsy, their bile to stop convulsions, their

whiskers to sooth toothache and their penises as a potent sexual tonic.

 

The most valuable parts, however, are the bones, which are used to make wine

that is said to cure rheumatism and arthritis, and prolong life.

 

Despite its rapid modernisation, the use of traditional medicine in China

has increased rather than declined because more people can afford exotic

treatments.

 

Tiger bone wine, made by steeping tiger bones in huge vats of potent 38 per

cent-proof rice wine, has for more than 2,000 years been one of the most

expensive and sought-after Chinese traditional medicines, believed to bestow

the tiger's power and strength upon the taker.

 

It is popular among wealthy middle-aged men including, reportedly, some of

the Communist Party's senior officials and is said to have been used by

modern China's founder Chairman Mao Tse-Tung himself, in the superstitious

belief that it counters the effects of ageing and boosts flagging sex drive.

 

Because of the scarcity of tigers, a single bottle of tiger bone wine from a

rare vintage year can sell for £600 or more. As well as a supposed medical

remedy, it is a prestigious drink sometimes shared between men at high-level

political or business meetings, or drunk at lavish parties.

 

The lucrative trade has accelerated the disappearance of all but a handful

of China ' s remaining wild tigers as peasants turn poachers to track down

the animals, knowing just one will make them more money than a farmer can

earn in a decade.

 

Millionaire Zhou Weisen, who is 47 and was born in the Year of the Tiger

himself, realised at an early age he could make his fortune by keeping

tigers in wretched captivity. He opened the Guilin park with 60 tigers in

1993, breeding them intensively so their numbers boomed to today's

population of 1,500.

 

The park has the atmosphere of a medieval circus, with animals treated in a

way that would cause outrage in any western country.

 

Twice a day, a few relatively tame tigers are put on leashes and led out to

amuse small groups of visitors.

 

For the equivalent of £1.80 a time, parents and their children get the

opportunity to feed strips of beef to a scrawny, undernourished young tiger

in the care of a park keeper who, with no sense of irony, tells them the

tiger is a 'symbol of power in the animal kingdom'.

 

Then a ramshackle carnival float decorated with pictures of tigers is led

out with a collection of big cats cowering on its deck where they are forced

by park keepers to stand up on their hind legs, and beaten with wooden

stakes if they do not obey.

 

Parents clap and shriek with laughter while children look on with bemused

grins as the daily ritual is performed.

 

A closer look reveals that one of the performing tigers has a tumour on his

left leg the size of a football. Other tigers have untreated wounds and

scars from thrashings or fights with other tigers.

 

Only a few hundred of the park's animals are on view to visitors. The

majority are hidden from sight in row after row of cages outside the public

area of the park. Here, bored tigers crammed four or more to a cage, pace

restlessly back and forth.

 

Others are kept locked in small, concrete enclosures, spending their days in

perpetual darkness. They occasionally jump up on their hind legs to peer

through narrow, slit windows, to get a rare glimpse of daylight.

The rows of squalid sheds where the tigers live at Guilin 'park'

 

Life imprisonment: The rows of squalid sheds where the tigers live at Guilin

'park'

 

Welfare expert David Neale from Animals Asia, said after inspecting the

park: 'These animals are kept in appalling conditions and it is clear that

many are suffering from malnutrition. And if what the public can see is so

appalling, can you imagine what the conditions are like for the tigers

hidden from view?'

 

Ironically, the park is littered with billboards proclaiming the owners'

desire to protect wildlife. At the end of their tour of the park, visitors

are directed to a 'science hall' where a complete tiger skeleton is

displayed in a Perspex case.

 

This building is decorated with pictures showing a cave lined with

earthenware jars.

 

'Each jar contains 500kg of rice wine with a complete set of tiger bones,'

saleswoman Miss Li tells us with a practised patter.

 

'The wine is brewed in mountain caves a few hundred kilometres away where

the water is ideal. Top [Communist Party] officials like to drink this wine.

We serve it to them whenever they visit.'

 

Cutting hurriedly to the chase before the next group of guests finish their

tour of the park and enter the science hall, she then offers the tiger wine

in three, six and nine-year vintages at £60, £92 and £185 a bottle.

 

Miss Li assures us that if we buy here, our tiger wine comes with a

cast-iron guarantee of quality.

 

'We have more than 1,500 tigers,' she says. 'There is no lack of raw

materials for us. There are a few hundred dead tigers lying in our freezers.

I can promise you that we sell only authentic tiger products.

 

'You know, of course, that the tiger is a protected animal but the

government does allow us to trade tigers that have died naturally, as a way

of helping us financially.'

 

Asked whether they all died natural deaths, she replied vaguely: 'Many of

them die from illness or in fights with other tigers.'

 

Park owner Mr Zhou is also the owner of the secretive, subterranean factory

200 miles from Guilin where the bones and tiger bodies are processed in vast

cellars storing up to 8,000 tons of tiger bone wine. The factory sells

around 200,000 bottles a year and keeps up to 600 tiger skeletons at a time

in huge vats.

 

The underground caverns, where witnesses have reported seeing entire tigers

in 5ft high vats, are strictly off limits to visitors. But an assistant in

the factory shop was keen to tell us about the scale of the operation.

 

'Our peak time is now, just before the Chinese New Year,' she said. 'We have

so many orders and we simply haven't got enough boxes to complete the

packaging, or workers to process the orders.'

 

The factory has a huge network of salespeople across China, she said, and

charges steep distribution fees for anyone who wants to enjoy a slice of the

business in tiger wine.

 

Factory sales manager Miss Wang told our interpreter over the phone: 'If you

want to be a distributor, the licence will cost you 150,000 yuan (£14,000) a

year for a provincial capital-and 80,000 yuan (£7,500) for a smaller city. A

provincial sole distributor licence costs five million yuan (£468,000) a

year.'

 

The factory's products are showcased in a sales office in the nearby town of

Pingnan, where a variety of bottles of tiger bone wine are on show for

potential buyers. But even here, deep in the Chinese countryside, the trade

in tigers is a secret guarded with paranoid intensity.

 

As I took pictures of the outside of the sales office, I was approached by

two security guards who demanded to look at my camera and insisted I deleted

any pictures of the building.

 

They held me for 20 minutes and made frantic phone calls before letting me

go once they were satisfied my camera's memory was empty.

 

Hundreds of miles south in Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, the

city's licensed distributor - who gets his tiger bone wine from the Guilin

park - runs his business from the ground floor shop of a private apartment

complex.

 

Lu Xi Ning, who is in his early 40s, has known Zhou Weisen of the Guilin

tiger farm for more than ten years.

 

Visitors to his wine shop are allowed in by appointment only. 'It's a

sensitive business,' he tells me in a room containing bottles of tiger bone

wine of different vintages.

 

'My business has been improving in the last three years. But I cannot

advertise,' he says as he pours tea. 'It is reliant on regulars and

recommendations. Customers come back again and again though. More people

want our products because of the Year of the Tiger.'

 

Praising its health benefits, Lu said: 'I have been drinking it every day

for the past three years. I recommend one or two Chinese teacups each day.

It is good for your circulation.' He added with a knowing wink: 'It is

particularly good for men.'

 

Taking us to one side, he said quietly: 'If you travel by plane, you'd

better take the wine out of the tiger bottle and put it into a red wine

bottle or a Pepsi bottle, just to be on the safe side. Then it should be

fine.'

 

Jill Robinson, director of Animals Asia, has little doubt that the park has

similar networks of sellers for other tiger parts, such as skins, teeth,

eyeballs, whiskers and penises: all highly valued in Chinese traditional

medicine.

 

Robinson, who visited the park last year, described it as being nothing more

than a thinly disguised tiger farm.

 

'You can see that their remit is to keep the animals barely alive,' she

said. 'They keep breeding and do not properly report births or deaths so

they can use the bodies.'

 

It is a trade that Steve Broad, executive director of the international

wildlife watchdog group TRAFFIC, described as 'a disaster' not only for

China but the world's remaining wild tigers.

 

'It is inevitable that wild tiger products will get drawn into a market

created by farmed tiger parts,' he said. 'These business people are creating

a market that could be catastrophic for the wild tiger population.

 

'We are not talking about a medicine trade but a trade where the tiger tonic

is seen as a pick-me-up and the people who use it are doing it for bravado.

The rarer the animal the better. It is nurturing the worst possible market

among the rich and naive.'

 

Another body fighting to halt the trade in tiger bones is the Environmental

Investigation Agency (EIA). Spokeswoman Debbie Banks said: 'Tiger bone wine

is not about tradition. It is about commerce. If China is truly committed,

they will make a ban on all trade in tiger products happen. They need to

stop farming and breeding tigers.

 

'The farmers are thinking of all possible loopholes to exploit. They even

argue that because tiger bone is in the vat and not actually in the bottle,

then it is legal to sell. They also argue that it is a tonic rather than a

medicine and therefore not covered by the law.'

 

Wildly misleading: The image on an advert for the tiger 'park' at Guilin has

no relation to the reality

 

Appeals by the EIA to the Chinese government have so far fallen on deaf

ears. 'The State Forestry Administration said it would cost millions to

phase out the farms, and that we are interfering in sovereign issues,' Ms

Banks said.

 

Traditional beliefs are, it seems, tough to shift. The Guilin park, whose

owner boasts of how he has served tiger wine to some of China's top leaders,

has been given a £700,000 government grant to build new cages for its

'scientific research'.

 

We saw some of those new cages being put to use during our visit, housing up

to ten animals each as the park's breeding programme continues apace.

 

China's government has stubbornly resisted attempts to stop the illicit

trade in tiger parts. Despite grudgingly introducing legislation banning the

use of tiger bones in medicine, China argued at an international convention

in 2007 that the ban on trading tiger parts had 'seriously impacted not only

Chinese traditional culture but also the medicinal treatment and health care

of the Chinese people'.

 

Tigers, the Chinese government argued to the astonishment of delegates from

other countries, should be treated like crocodiles and farmed for their

bones and skin.

 

Perhaps fittingly, China itself is likely to be one of the first countries

to feel the effect of the trade in tiger parts. One week into the Year of

the Tiger, its own tiger population is on the brink of extinction.

 

History has been cruel to the big cat in China. Aside from the threat of

hunting, there has been urbanisation, and the bizarre 1959 decision by

Chairman Mao to declare the tiger 'an enemy of the people'.

 

Half a century later, as the trade in tiger bones puts a huge price on the

head of the remaining few wild Chinese tigers, Ms Robinson and other

conservationists believe the fate of the tiger in China is sealed.

 

'By the next Year of the Tiger [2022] China will not have any wild tigers

left,' she said. 'I wonder how proud the people involved in this trade will

be when they have to explain to their children what happened to the wild

tigers.'

 

We were unable to contact Zhou Weisen at the time of going to press, but an

employee at the Xiongshen Tiger And Bear Mountain Village confirmed on the

phone that the park sold tiger wine, made from the bones of 'eliminated

tigers'.

 

Questioned further about the process, he said: 'We are only selling the

tiger bone wine, I am not sure about the specifics.'

 

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