More tigers now live in cages than in the wild
The tiger, whose captive population (more than 12,500) now dwarfs its numbers in the wild (fewer than 4,000), is on the verge of becoming a fully industrialized commodity.
TERRENCE McCOY: ‘Over the past century or so, the tiger population has plunged in the wild, dropping from an estimated 100,000 to fewer than 4,000, while the number in captivity had exploded to more than 12,500. Nowhere else was the animal’s commodification more complete than in tiger farming, where it is raised, butchered for parts and sold for tens of thousands of dollars. And nowhere else had these farms operated with greater impunity than in Laos, an obscure communist nation whose own wild tigers have nearly all been killed. Karl Ammann is one of the few people who’d seen inside the country’s farms…
For nearly five years, Ammann, 70, a Swiss counter-trafficking conservationist, had tracked the tiger butcher, a man named Nikhom Keovised. He had placed hidden cameras inside what had once been the largest tiger farm in Southeast Asia, an illegal operation where tigers had been raised to one end — slaughter — and where the man doing the slaughtering had been Keovised. And he had listened to Keovised describe it all in his own words: “Use the anesthetic,” he had said. “Then just cut the neck.” Then “peel its skin”.
Now Keovised had established himself here, in this half-splash of civilization near the Vietnam border, where he’d just opened what his boss — considered one of the nation’s biggest wildlife traffickers — described as a zoo, but what Ammann suspected was a front for selling tigers. Ammann knew the risks. He was in the country without permission to investigate its wildlife practices… But he could already feel the familiar intensity. It had driven him to undertake dozens of risky, self-funded investigations, pushed him to the fringes of the conservation community and caused even friends to describe him as obsessive, if not a little crazy. He couldn’t stop.
Those responsible had to be held to account. Species by species, the world is rapidly undergoing an ecological transformation, becoming barely recognizable from the planet it was a few centuries ago. It is a world reckoning with an end of wildness, where humanity and domesticated animals account for almost all mammal biomass, and the tiger, whose captive population now dwarfs its numbers in the wild, is on the verge of becoming a fully industrialized commodity’. SOURCE…
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