- At Sriracha Tiger Zoo, just outside Bangkok, some 400
big cats snarl photogenically for the tourists, boy scouts queue at the
petting zoo to cuddle placid tiger cubs which, bizarrely, have been suckled
by sows, and at the circus arena on the zoo premises, tigers thrill crowds
by bounding through rings of fire on cue.
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- But, behind the happy scenes, questions are being asked
about this zoo and the animals it breeds in such numbers: where do all
the tigers go? And is a shipment of 100 live tigers to China the tip of
an illicit trade that serves the demand for tiger meat and folk medicine
or aphrodisiacs concocted from ground bones?
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- This week, one of the zoo's owners, Sommai Temsiripong,
faces charges for breeding tigers without a permit. It may well prove to
be the opening phase of the great Thailand tiger scandal.
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- Campaigners have already raised issues about Sriracha.
Sarah Christie, of the Zoological Society of London, said: "The way
in which tigers are kept and bred , with such unnaturally large social
groupings, is completely alien and different to carnivore breeding management
elsewhere."
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- Each of the Bengal tigresses on display can produce a
dozen cubs a year for around 15 years. In tropical climes, most are perpetually
on heat and because some tiger mothers routinely eat or abandon their offspring,
cubs often are separated and raised alongside pigs. The zookeepers claim
this practice hastens the tigers' growth rate by up to 25 per cent.
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- But Victor Watkins of the World Society for the Protection
of Animals (WSPA), said: "Behind the scenes there are hundreds more
tigers being bred in appalling conditions. The park states that there are
no more than 200-400 tigers there. But they are breeding lots of new cubs
every year, which prove impossible to trace. They say they are being bred
for zoos but we can find no evidence of that."
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- In March, Thai legislators launched an investigation
into a cargo of 100 live Bengal tigers from Sriracha Zoo that were sent
by jumbo jet to Sanya Love World theme park in Hainan, southern China,
on Christmas Eve 2002. Love World is run by Sanya-Maitree Concept Co, which
is co-owned by the Hainan Governor, Wei Liucheng, and a Thai entrepreneur,
Maitree Temsiripong.
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- Mr Maitree told reporters that a new Chinese government-sponsored
research centre for tigers has ambitious plans to breed 200,000 cats within
the next five years and eventually to release some from a forest preserve
into the wild. No hard evidence appears to back up these claims, however.
A spokeswoman from Sriracha Zoo, Jin Tana, denied that its tiger-breeding
project had ever smuggled or trafficked animals for commercial gain: "Those
100 tigers were not sold. It was merely an exchange of animals with our
Chinese partner." But last week, Thailand's National Intelligence
subcommittee ruled that three government officials should be disciplined
for violating the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) by signing export papers for Sriracha without checking how the
animals were obtained.
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- The scandal is unfolding as Bangkok prepares to host
a CITES convention in October, and the fallout if there were flagrant violations
by Thailand and China, both signatory countries, is bound to prove embarrassing.
Thailand's notoriety as a wildlife trafficking supermarket will be hard
to shed if it is proven that officials exploited a loophole that allows
the loan and exchange of endangered species for scientific breeding programmes.
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- Mr Watkins believes that the officials are being used
as scapegoats. He said: "The government is anxious to clear the whole
thing up before the conference, and so is prosecuting a few officials.
The whole park just clearly needs to be closed. There is no justification
for breeding tigers in such large numbers; they are unlikely to survive
if released into the wild and they are not being bred in registered studbooks
and so zoos won't touch them."
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- Police commander Sawaek Pinsinchai told The Nation, a
Bangkok daily: "Five months of investigation have led me to suspect
that many of the tigers the company declared as having been bred in captivity
were actually wild animals smuggled into the country."
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- Tiger pelts are valuable but hard to conceal, and black
marketeers earn far more money by digging under the skin. The Chinese traditionally
use ground tiger bone to ease rheumatism, the brain to treat acne and kidney
fat to prolong erections. Tiger penis is soaked with an exotic liqueur
which is quaffed at high end Chinese brothels. But the live tigers from
Sriracha were labelled "No commercial value".
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- A report conducted by the Environmental Investigation
Agency into Thailand's tiger economy in 2001 found that several medicines
derived from tiger bones were actually on sale on the zoo premises, at
the Sriracha Health Traditional Medical Clinic.
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- The Worldwide Fund for Wildlife estimates that only 5,200
tigers remain in the wild.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=519408
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