Word: tigers
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India, with an estimated 60% of the world's tigers, perhaps as many as 3,750, is determined to protect them. But the country's ambitious system of 21 reserves has proved increasingly susceptible to human predators. Over the past five years, the parks' tiger populations have dropped 35% on average. In one notorious killing spree between 1989 and 1992, Ranthambhore National Park in Rajasthan lost 18 tigers to poachers, even though 60 guards were patrolling the forest...
Ironically, what makes the tiger so vulnerable to humans is its unshakable grip on the human imagination. For millenniums, tigers have prowled the minds of mankind as surely as they have trod the steppes and forests of Asia. On the banks of the Amur River in Russia, archaeologists discovered 6,000-year-old depictions of tigers carved by the Goldis people, who revered the tiger as an ancestor and as god of the wild regions. In Hindu mythology the goddess Durga rides the tiger. And Chang Tao-ling, a patriarch of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, also mounts...
...more than ever the tiger's mystique is its ticket to the boneyard. If Asian cultures no longer revere the tiger as a god, many still believe that the animal is the source of healing power. Shamans and practitioners of traditional medicine, especially the Chinese, value almost every part of the cat. They believe that tiger-bone potions cure rheumatism and enhance longevity. Whiskers are thought to contain potent poisons or provide strength; pills made from the eyes purportedly calm convulsions. Affluent Taiwanese with flagging libidos pay as much as $320 for a bowl of tiger-penis soup, thinking...
...beautiful tiger skin may bring its seller as much as $15,000, but the bones and other body parts generate even more money, and they are much easier to smuggle and peddle. As incomes rise in Asia, people can afford to pay tens or hundreds of dollars for a dose of tiger-based medicine. And as the destruction of tigers decreases supply, the price of their parts rises further, creating ever greater incentives for poachers to kill the remaining animals...
...forces driving the black market are so strong that nothing -- not public opinion, not political pressure, not the power of police -- has halted the tiger's slide toward extinction. Can international trade sanctions against Asian nations succeed where all else has failed? There is no guarantee. The tiger's plight reveals the limits of conservation efforts and raises disturbing questions about humanity's ability to share the planet with other animals. Says Elinor Constable, an Assistant Secretary of State who leads U.S. diplomatic efforts to help the tiger: "If the concerted efforts of the world cannot save the tiger, what...