So you guys must of heard bits and pieces on Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM. The chinese use traditional methods that include random parts of animals in concoctions that they call medicines, now there is no real scientific evidence to prove that TCM works but it has been used for thousands of years, and therefore this makes me believe that it produces a placebo affect, and for those who do not know what this means, it basically means that if you believe something is going to make you better you are more likely to get better anyway because believing actually helps! For example some people would take sugar pills instead of a real drug when trying to get rid of a headache, they would not know it was a sugar pill and believe it was paracetamol but the headache goes away anyway, see where I am coming from now?
What I am going to be discussing through this entry is the fact that tigers are being heavily poached in the wild just to be used in this so called medicinal techniques, some believe that hanging tiger nose leather above your bed will increase fertility, so you are more likely to have a baby…
At the present time, the trade in tiger parts and the use of them in TCM is banned but the problem is that the demand is still incredibly high and tiger farms are not banned. I am not however proposing that tiger farms be banned as well. There are some farms in china that keep the tigers in good condition with good quality housing. The positive side to these farms is that the fact they can be used as gene banks, at least one farm in china has around 500 pure bred siberian tigers which could potentially keep the genes going for future reintroductions when the habitiat has been re-established! I know it sounds controversial, but we haven’t even got into the depths of it yet!
Not only are these banks a good gene pool but maybe (like we discussed with the Rhino-horn trade) by making it legal to trade in tiger parts then more people are likely to go into tiger farming, make lots of money meaning that living conditions for the tigers are much better (of course policing it would be a big issue) and then everyone benefits, the people who want to parts would get what they want, breeding programmes for sub-species would spread like wild fire, there might be less poaching in the wild because it would more freely available on the market and more reintroductions would happen, better still if the people wanting the tiger parts were educated then they may be more inclined to look after the tigers habitat if they know they will benefit from more tigers in the wild. It would be a big step and of course it is no where near happening yet but it is something to think about. Unfortunately with these kind of problems we can’t just think about a single animal, we must think about the survival of the species and if killing means saving, then that is what must be done, it must be done with culling to keep populations down such as the antelope and elephants which also been discussed as well as with incidences like this.
The way the problem is going at the moment is that the tiger is going to become extinct in the next 15-20 years unless something drastic is done, that has been mentioned by the media plenty of times and was raised early this year with this year being the year of the tiger. Lets re-cap on the 4 sub-species that have already been lost to hunting of some kind. First we have the Balinese tiger, this tiger was the smallest of all the sub-species. The Javan tiger originally from the island of Java in Indonesia. The Caspian tiger, a much larger beast but still not as big as the Siberian tiger or Amur tiger which is the largest of all the sub-species, and now the South-Chinese Tiger which is newest of the extinct species, it has only recently been declared as extinct but the last one was seen around 30-40 years ago. We now have the Amur Tiger, the Sumatran Tiger (the smallest of surviving sub-species), Bengal or Indian Tiger, Indo-chinese tiger and the newly discovered Mayalan tiger (they now realise that this is a seperate sub-species when it originally believed to be part of another sub-species). All these are critically endangered. The Bengal and Amur tiger are doing considerably better than the other sub-species due to significant breeding programmes but now the Sumatran tiger will be focused on.
So the question is can we still save them, do we have the time and resources and the passion? TCM is just a small part of the problem, poaching and habitat destruction are the main threats to the survival of this key species.
