Eleven rare Siberian tigers have died at a wildlife park in a startling case that activists say hints at unsavory practices among some zoos and animal farms in China: They are overbreeding endangered animals in the hopes of making illicit profit on their carcasses.
The deaths of the tigers occurred in the past three months at the zoo in China’s frigid northeast, officials and state media said on Friday. Reports said the tigers starved to death, having been fed nothing but chicken bones, while a zoo manager said unspecified diseases killed the animals.
Either way, the animals had been ill-kept and ill-fed. The Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo has struggled financially, even withholding pay from staff, said a woman in charge of corporate planning for the zoo who would only give her surname, Wang. The zoo had been up for auction for some time without any bidders, she said.
“You can do the math: One tiger eats 10 kilograms of beef per day and there are at least 30 of them now, and there are lions, elephants and other animals too,” Wang said. “The zoo has been taking money from the staffers’ salaries to feed the animals.”
The food bill for the tigers ran to about US$1,320 a day — nearly half the food allowance the zoo gets from the local government to care for all the animals, Wang said.
The deaths underscore conflicting signals in China’s attempts to save its dwindling number of tigers. While extensive conservation efforts are under way, animal protection groups say zoos and wildlife parks may be deliberately breeding more animals than they can afford, hoping to sell off the carcasses onto a black market where tiger parts fetch a high price for use in traditional medicines and liquor.
“We’ve seen cases where tiger farms have steeped the bones from their deceased tigers in liquor to sell to visitors,” said Hua Ning, project director for the China branch of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Other animal rights groups like the Washington-based National Fish and Wildlife Foundation have documented stockpiled pelts and the sale of tiger wine at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain village in south China’s Guangxi region.
Hua said she didn’t have any specific information about illicit sales of tiger parts by the Shenyang zoo, but she and other activists said Chinese tiger farms in particular were breeding too aggressively.
“Some of these farms are raising the tigers precisely because they hope that there will be some relaxation of the ban on tiger parts and they can sell the parts and derivatives,” Hua said.
Tiger parts are still available on the black market as well, probably sourced from farms or zoos as there are so few wild tigers left in China, she said.
Siberian tigers are one of the world’s rarest species, with 300 left in the wild, 50 in China. However, more than 5,000 are held captive on farms and wildlife parks across China.
Xie Yan, China director for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, said she expected the overbreeding of captive tigers in China to come up at a meeting of signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) that began on Saturday in Doha, Qatar.
Xie’s group wants China to make animal sanctuaries use birth control to “reduce the number of tigers in captivity to make sure they are well-treated.”
The goal should be to boost China’s wild Siberian tiger population and restore habitats that have been destroyed by industrialization, she said.
The Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo, where the latest deaths occurred, is a long-troubled tourist spot also known as the Glacier Animal Zoo. In November 2007, three tigers killed a fourth during a fight over food. At the end of last year, two hungry tigers there were shot and killed by police after they mauled a zookeeper.
In the latest deaths, the state-run China Daily newspaper quoted Liu Xiaoqiang of the Shenyang Wild Animal Protection Station as saying that the tigers had been kept in cold, cramped metal cages and were fed nothing but chicken bones.
Zoo spokesman Wu Xi said, however, that the animals died from “various diseases” that were hard for them to endure because of this year’s unusually harsh winter. He said the tigers were kept in cages indoors because of the bitter cold.
Wu wouldn’t specify what diseases the animals had. He said 30 tigers now remain at the zoo, but some remain at risk of illness.
“Some of the physically strong ones might survive the current difficulty, including the cold weather and the diseases,” Wu said.
Wang said the bodies of the 11 tigers have been put into a storage freezer, but denied plans to sell them.
“China has regulations on tiger skins and bones, which are barred from going to market,” she said.
China banned the sale of tiger parts and the use of tiger parts in Chinese medicine in 1993, imposing stiff sentences on offenders, but tiger bone, penis, pelts and other parts are still sold illegally to consumers — some who believe the products increase potency or can cure ailments from convulsions to skin disease.
China’s laws against poaching are tough — killing an endangered tiger can be punishable by death — but the legislation doesn’t address irresponsible zoo keepers who abuse or neglect captive tigers.
“Because there is no legal standard, facilities like these apply their own,” Hua said. “Some take good care of the animals, but there are also a lot of abuse cases.”
Also See: Tuna takes center stage at CITES meet
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of