So there I was, driving along and minding my own business, when NPR had to go and crush my day. They had a piece on “wildlife tourism” that included an interview with a Swedish conservationist who is working on a documentary about tiger farms in Asia. There used to be 100,000 tigers in the wild, now there are 4,000 or fewer; but there are more than 12,000 in “farms.” Normally I’m all in favor of farming… it’s a dandy way to preserve a species. Cows, pigs and chickens sure ain’t going extinct anytime soon, for instance. But tigers ain’t chickens. They are a fundamentally different sort of critter, and while eating pigs and sheep and the like is a perfectly fine thing to do, the uses made of tigers are pretty much all freakin’ ridiculous. The nadir of the story comes in the link above at about the 38 minute mark. A Chinese shop owner in Laos has some pink items that caused curiosity due to their color; the description for how they’re pink made me want to punch the radio to make it shut the frak up, then pull over, rip the radio out of the car, throw it onto the pavement, jump up and down on it, set it on fire and toss the smoking remnants into a deep dark pit, then drive to my nearest congressman and demand that the world withdraw from east Asia the right to use modern technology until their culture has grown up enough to be allowed to have things like electricity and the internal combustion engine and antibiotics and the Haber process.
Clearly, I was a tad annoyed. Listen at your peril.
Farming tigers for useless trinkets and fraudulent medicines is a ridiculous notion. Farming them for their meat, just as much so… predators make terrible farm animals because you have to feed them, you know, meat. Cows can get by with grass and weeds, but predators need many times their own meat-weight in food-meat, which is clearly stupid economics.
Still, there are more tigers in farms than there are in the wild. Soon, wild tigers will likely be extinct and will only exist in farms, zoos and the homes of a few crazy people. A great idea would be to get people to stop hunting them in the wild, but the same economics that makes farming them profitable also spurs people to hunt them, and there’s bound to be several jackholes who have an itch to be the guy to bring down the very last wild tiger.
I’ve honestly few ideas about how to save the species. Other than an east Asian zombie apocalypse, the best I have is a series of planetary terraforming projects to create continent-sized wildlife parks, something that relatively tiny orbital habs are sadly insufficient for. Creatures like lions and tigers require relatively vast herds of prey animals, and vast herds of water buffalo and antelope and the like require a whole lot of open area. The total sustainable population of tigers in an Island Three would probably be far below the safe number needed for decent genetics. So maybe we can get the animal rights activists behind the idea of terraforming Venus and Mars? Doubtful, I suppose, but probably easier than convincing two billion Chinese to knock it off with the powdered rhino horn-based boner pills.