Tele, a Sumatran tiger, is at once an awesome and pathetic sight. A fully-grown female, she hobbles around in a cage in Medan Zoo on front paws maimed by snares she freed herself from. Her tail, an amputated stump, is testimony to the final crude wire trap she was unable to escape.
Her good fortune was that rangers in Indonesia's Gunung Leuser National Park got to her before the trappers. Otherwise, Tele would have been another victim of the trade in traditional Chinese medicine that is helping push the Sumatran Tiger to the very brink of extinction.
After selling her skin, hunters would have hawked her bones probably for less than US$200 for her full skeleton. The bones would then have been crushed down for use in Chinese medicine to treat rheumatism and a variety of other ailments.
In the early 1900s, Dutch colonists reported a plague of Sumatran Tigers, then one of three sub-species in Indonesia along with the tigers of Bali and Java. Now there are reckoned to be only 400 to 500 Sumatran Tigers left while the last tigers in Bali and Java were sighted in the late 1930s and 1976 respectively.
A combination of hunting and rapidly-disappearing habitat is now raising fresh alarm over the plight of the Sumatran Tiger. A report issued last week by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, and the World Wide Fund for Nature says the tigers have since 1998 been hunted and killed at the rate of 50 a year.
"If we are even close to being right in our estimates, we are looking at a possible 10-year horizon for the Sumatran Tiger," said James Compton, Director of Traffic Southeast Asia.
"However, if there is a measurable effort to crack down on the trade and make these tiger products unavailable, as well as looking at habitat protection for the tiger, that 10-year horizon might be moved back."
In Hong Kong and China, that means focusing attention on the continuing trade in tiger bones for traditional Chinese medicine and appealing to anyone who hears of any trade in the critically endangered species to turn suspects in.
Penalties in Hong Kong are formidable. Since the 1990s, anyone caught trading in or smuggling tiger parts can face a fine of up to HK$5 million (US$640,000) and two years in jail, according to a spokesman for the Agriculture Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD).
The situation is vastly different from a decade ago when traditional medicine shops in Hong Kong would openly sell tiger bone used to treat rheumatism, ulcers, typhoid, malaria dysentery and burns.
At that time, tiger bone would be sold by the tael (38g) and a shop in the city in 1993 reportedly had tiger paws on sale in a display cabinet with an asking price of around US$6,000 each.
"The chances of finding tiger parts and packaged medicines in Hong Kong are much lower than 10 years ago," Compton said. "We don't have any recent information about the open availability of tiger medicines.
"The Traditional Chinese Medicine Community was originally very much against the very high penalties but over time, and through consultation, their understanding is higher as to why this is important."
China too, as a signatory of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) has introduced severe sentences for traders and smugglers. But Traffic believes the crackdown has had the effect of driving the trade in tiger parts underground.
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