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China's tiger ban is working, say wildlife watchdogs
2007-03-12
Groups monitoring trade in endangered species on Tuesday urged China to resist pressures to ease its ban on commerce in tiger parts, saying its tough restrictions had helped the great feline to survive. "In the early 1990s, we feared that Chinese demand for tiger parts would drive the tiger to extinction by the new millennium," said Steven Broad, executive director of TRAFFIC, an monitoring programme set up by WWF and the World Conservation Union (IUCN). "The tiger survives today thanks in large part to China's prompt, strict and committed action. To overturn the ban and allow any trade in captive-bred tiger products would waste all the efforts that China has invested in saving wild tigers. "It would be a catastrophe for tiger conservation." TRAFFIC, based in Gland, Switzerland, said in a press release it had evidence that investors who had put money into setting up large-scale captive-breeding "tiger farms" in China were pushing for the legalisation of trade of products from these facilities. Around 4,000 tigers are now caged in these farms, according to its estimate. Tiger bones and other parts are used as supposed medicines and aphrodisiacs. The Chinese government has worked hard to stamp out the superstition and promote substitutes, TRAFFIC said. Undercover surveys by its investigators found that less than three percent of 663 medicine shops and dealers claimed to stock it, and most retailers were aware that tigers are protected and illegal to trade. "Allowing trade in tiger parts to resume, even if they are from captive-bred tigers, would inevitably lead to an increase in demand for such products," said Susan Lieberman, director of WWF's Global Species Programme. "And a legal market in China could give poachers across Asia an avenue for 'laundering' tigers killed in the wild, especially as farmed and wild tiger products are indistinguishable in the marketplace."
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