Home InitiativesCATTTiger Farming CWS Response

Can we Save Tigers by Eating Them?

Sir:

Barun Mitra (NY-Times OPED-August 19, 2006) repackages an old proposal that has been doing the rounds for over a decade: legally farming tigers (just as we farm pigs and buffalos) to meet the demand and create new markets for their body parts, thus turning a serious conservation problem into a great conservation opportunity. While market-driven solutions may attain socially desirable goals in some contexts (like farming cotton) and not in others (like farming opium), I believe Mitra's medicine for reversing tiger decline is worse than the disease that he hopes to cure.

Despite the media hype created by a section of tiger conservationists (based on the somewhat aberrant case of tiger extinction in Sariska reserve of India), scientific studies clearly show that the shrinkage of tiger range and depression of tiger densities are not primarily driven by poaching of tigers for body parts. This tiger decline is predominantly driven by depressed reproduction and increased mortalities caused by overhunting of tiger prey like deer, pigs and wild cattle. Degradation of tiger habitats from a variety of causes (local villagers to mega development projects) compounds this problem. Therefore, farming of tigers for profit, even if it were to reduce tiger poaching (a highly questionable hypothesis) simply cannot reverse the tiger's present decline.

Long term scientific studies show that wild tiger populations are highly productive: where they subsist on an abundant prey base they can remain viable despite natural annual losses of 20%, showing the critical importance prey depletion as the key driver of tiger declines. Before someone rushes into suggest we should then start farming tiger's prey species also, may I point out that pigs and cattle have indeed been farmed for centuries? That has not stopped Asian villagers from killing off their wild relatives.

Contrary to Mitra' belief, it is countries like India and Nepal that had strict tiger protection laws for three decades that now harbor the best and most viable wild tiger populations in world. On the other hand, despite their vigorous promotion tiger farming, China, Korea and Vietnam have either totally lost or are about to lose all their wild tigers -with little realistic hope of ecological recovery. Let us also not forget that before conservationists stepped in with their protectionist policies in the early 1970', there did indeed exist a complete global free market in tigers, which wiped them off 93% of their historical range.

Ullas Karanth

Director Centre for Wildlife Studies, India