Next year is the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar, but conservationists say the omens are inauspicious for an animal on the brink of extinction.
If anything, the tiger’s year in the Chinese zodiac may hasten its demise, conservationists fear, with festive demand for its skin and body parts encouraging poachers to hunt the few animals that still remain in the wild.
“The Year of the Tiger will put more pressure on wild tigers,” Michael Baltzer, head of the WWF Tiger Initiative, said during a tiger conservation conference held in Kathmandu which wound up on Friday.
“The use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine has fallen, but the trend of giving tiger parts as gifts and souvenirs is growing,” Baltzer said, adding that he expected this demand to increase next year.
“There is a certain consumer group who want to use tiger parts to show how wealthy they are, as a status symbol, and this group of people is increasing,” he said.
Experts from the lobby group Save the Tiger Fund estimate that only 3,200 tigers survive in the wild, down from 100,000 a century ago, mainly because of poaching and loss of habitat in south and southeast Asia.
Although tiger hunting is illegal worldwide and the international trade in tiger parts is banned under a treaty binding 167 countries — including China — experts say the illicit trade is still flourishing.
Despite officially banning the trade in tiger body parts in 1993, China has 6,000 tigers on 14 farms across the country, said Li Zhang, program director of Conservation International in Beijing.
These farms are able to produce about 1,000 cubs annually.
China has been pushing for an agreement to resume trade in tiger products and delegates at Kathmandu conference say its officials raised the issue at the conference.
Chinese officials at the conference, which was organized by the Global Tiger Initiative, an alliance of governments, NGOs and the private sector, declined to comment to the media.
Tiger skins, which fetch high prices in China and elsewhere in Asia, are used for furniture and decoration, while body parts are used in traditional medicine and aphrodisiacs. In China, the animal is also a symbol of power, energy and bravery, as well as good luck.
Huang Lixin, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco, said in Kathmandu that the threat to tigers posed by the Year of the Tiger, which will start on Feb. 14, was real.
“Owning tiger skins in China is becoming a status symbol, a luxury item,” she said. “Chinese consumers will want tiger bones or tiger wine and liquor, or tiger skins, to celebrate the year.”
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