Hunting the traffickers: How we’ve failed to stop the international tiger trade
Across southeast Asia, thousands of tigers are living in captivity, bred in theory to relieve the pressure on their wild counterparts. But in practice, the animals are being smuggled, sold and slaughtered for their body parts. Harriet Marsden reports
Tyger Tyger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night. Perhaps no longer. Since William Blake wrote his most famous poem, an estimated 96 per cent of wild tigers have disappeared. There are fewer than 4,000 left.
But across southeast Asia, at least 8,000 tigers are living in captivity, bred in theory to relieve the pressure on their wild counterparts. But in practice, tigers are being smuggled, sold and slaughtered for their parts. Once hunted for their distinctive skins, today they’re being made into bone products like glue or wine, and trade is booming. An upcoming documentary, airing on BBC2 on 4 March, lays bare the brutal transnational tiger trade.
Tigers: Hunting the Traffickers, an hour-long programme made by Grain Media – the award-winning production company behind Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) – stars Aldo Kane, a former Royal Marines Commando turned anti-poaching activist. The team, led by Laura Warner, a self-shooting producer-director, collaborated with local wildlife crime investigators and NGOs for a year to track the trade across southeast Asia. Finally, they took their evidence to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Geneva to try to persuade international delegates to take action.
Kane has spent years fighting wildlife poachers, diving into a criminal underworld where animals are worth more dead than alive. But nothing, he says, could have prepared him for what he uncovered about the illegal tiger trade.
The tigers in this documentary are not the majestic striped hunters of our imagination, pacing imperiously through the jungle. These are babies in mesh cages, or starving adults coming up to the bars like inquisitive housecats, hungry for attention. With frozen cubs in freezers and bloated carcasses in basements ready to be cooked, Warner paints a picture of a species in crisis.
The paradox: farms created to protect wild tigers from poaching have fuelled a demand for tiger products, which in turn has increased the number of tigers being poached. The solution is exacerbating the problem. And the market where more tigers are consumed than anywhere else? China.
A changing tide in China
Traditionally, in China the tiger is king – an ancient symbol of power. But in the 1980s, the world woke up to the truth: tigers were on the brink of extinction. In 1983, eight Siberian tigers were gifted by US zoos to China so that it could begin breeding them in captivity. By 1986, the first tiger farm had been set up in Heilongjiang province, but to produce bones for medicinal use. The following year, CITES banned all international commercial tiger trade.
By 1993 there was international outcry. After a massive spike in poaching, the wild tiger population in China had dropped to just 85. The US threatened China with trade sanctions, and it responded, banning the domestic trade of tiger bone and rhino horn. Tiger bones were removed from the traditional medicine pharmacopeia. But the country didn’t stop farming tigers, and the ban didn’t apply to skins. It was also never clear whether it applied to captive-bred tiger bone.
After another spike in poaching, in 2007 all CITES parties agreed that tiger-breeding farms should be phased out. But China’s wildlife laws promoted breeding for “conservation”, and farms, at least two of which benefited from huge government investment, continued to breed anyway. The population of captive-bred tigers in China grew from fewer than 20 in 1986 to somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 in 2013. Fairly soon, China was sitting on a massive stockpile of carcasses. Meanwhile, its wild tiger population had fallen to fewer than 50 animals.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), at the forefront of tackling the trade in big cat parts for more than 20 years, produced a report in 2013, Hidden in Plain Sight, which revealed that China had encouraged breeding not for conservation, but to supply its growing legal trade in tiger skins. This fuelled poaching of wild tigers to meet the demand, and increased demand for other products, such as a drink made by soaking tiger bones in wine.
According to the report: “Policies in China are directly stimulating demand and poaching, and the problem of tiger ‘farming’ and trade is spreading to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. A failure to act indicates an implicit acceptance of a legal trade in the skins of captive-bred tigers, the beginning of a slippery slope towards accepting a legal trade in the bones of captive-bred tigers, and ultimately extinction of tigers in the wild.”
Tiger wine has become a popular luxury product. You can buy a beautifully aged bottle of the stuff like you would a single malt whisky
Chinese journalists were on the case. In 2014, the government admitted to the skin trade, although it continued to deny that tiger bones were being traded. Then in October 2018, China shocked the world by repealing the ban to allow captive-bred tiger bones to be used for medicinal purposes. The international outcry led to the repeal being postponed, but it didn’t reverse the decision. The postponement was also only announced to the English-language media.
Since then, in China it has been legal to keep and breed tigers with a permit and to trade captive-bred skins domestically – and there are multiple zoos, circuses or conservation centres doing just that. Thanks to there being so many loopholes in Chinese law, there are now more than 200 tiger farms operating across the country. Many have ties to powerful local authorities, who help them expand.
In the city of Changsha in southern China, the documentary crew sneak into a tiger farm supposedly breeding for conservation purposes. Instead, they find boxes and boxes of tiger wine, piled high against the wall like in a warehouse. An anonymous Chinese activist shows Kane pictures of a cellar, where they strip the meat and fat from the bones and put the carcasses in a clay pot to bake. He explains that there is a premium for wine made from wild tiger.
The traditional medicine sector has been supportive of efforts not to use tiger parts. But as China has grown richer over the past few decades, tiger wine has become a popular luxury product. You can buy a beautifully aged bottle of the stuff like you would a single malt whisky. As affluence grows, so does demand. Neither wild tigers nor farms can sustain the supply, so the industry has spread all over southeast Asia. There is simply too much money to be made.
The trafficking route
The documentary begins in Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia, an area of jungle thought to date back more than 130 million years. In the undergrowth there are active snares so big that they can only be for tigers. Malaysia is where Kane did his military training. Since then, he says, he has been “absolutely obsessed” with tigers.
“I first joined the Royal Marines at the age of 16, and I have spent many years travelling the globe. I have also spent a huge amount of time in the jungles of southeast Asia,” Kane says. “I still remember the exhilarating feeling of sharing the dense forest with the wild tiger, for me the most majestic apex predator.”
Now, 20 years later, there are fewer than 200 in this park.
On to Sriracha, the biggest tiger zoo in Thailand. Kane and his accompanying investigator suspect that this is a holding zoo for tigers before they are shipped across the border. There is great danger associated with this kind of investigation – the anonymous investigator tells the camera cheerily: “People like me get shot regularly
In Thailand, unlike China, any trade in parts of captive-bred tigers or dead tiger cubs would be illegal – if detected. But private individuals are allowed to own tigers, and zoo licences are given to facilities that appear to be for conservation purposes. The number of captive tigers continues to grow across the 44 registered zoos. Thailand now exports more captive tigers than anywhere else in the world.
In theory, there is a centralised database containing the DNA of all Thailand’s captive-bred tigers. In 2016, the Thai government said that there were 1,450–2,500 tigers in captivity, but it has not confirmed a figure since. Sources suggest that only around 500 tigers have actually been profiled.
A major gap in Thailand’s legislation is the lack of regulation around “readily recognisable derivatives” – products claiming to contain tiger. That means that tiger bone glue is openly offered to busloads of Chinese and Vietnamese tourists.
Many of the Thai tigers, the documentary explains, are trafficked over the border into Laos, where the trade is controlled by violent organised crime gangs who bribe the local government.
A London Zoo spokesperson estimates that it costs £500 per year to feed an adult tiger
In 2016, CITES pressured Laos to shut its farms, conduct an audit of all its captive tigers and ban breeding. Laos announced that it would phase out its tiger farms, turning them into tourist attractions. But the EIA and the EU both warned that this would not stop commercial tiger breeding or the illegal trade of body parts. They were right.
Dr Ross McEwing, a wildlife forensic scientist, is helping conduct the audit. He is one of the few allowed into Laos’s tiger zoos. “My job is to go from country to country, and I just see death,” he says. “I just see the scale of the operations … the animals killed for no legitimate reason.”
Kane and his crew investigate the deep freezers where they believe the feed for the animals is kept. Inside, it turns out, are dead tiger cubs.
Into Vietnam, the most dangerous part of the route, where the illegal trade has the deepest government links. At least one farm is run by a US-designated international crime organisation. Groups are smuggling tigers in from Laos and Thailand and keeping them in basement cages. Rich customers from Hanoi can watch a live tiger be slaughtered and cooked to order.
The tigers here are bloated, pitiful creatures, almost immobilised. In the final days of their lives, they are injected with liquid to make them grotesquely engorged. After all, tigers are sold by weight.
What’s a tiger worth?
Tigers don’t come cheap. A whole live tiger can cost upwards of $30,000. The costs associated with keeping one are also high, given that they eat meat and can theoretically rip your head off. A London Zoo spokesperson estimates that it costs £500 per year to feed an adult tiger, but says that the costs associated with housing and safe transportation aren’t easily calculable.
Tiger bone is worth more in Asia than cocaine is in South America. One adult tiger can be made into 12 blocks of tiger glue. That’s about $84,000 per tiger
There is a sweet spot: you want to get the tiger to maturity, and then consume or sell it on its second birthday when it’s at its heaviest. But if you keep the animal for longer than three years, you start to lose profit. And the most expensive thing you can do is transport an adult tiger. But, if you breed them, you solve a lot of problems. Cubs are easy to transport in bulk.
Unlike pandas, tigers breed very well in captivity. They have a short gestation period and can be bred roughly every six months, with litters of up to four cubs. To put it simply, there’s a lot of potential profit in breeding. But many of these animals are now inbred, and miscarriage is a common side effect. That means subsidiary by-products. There’s a new product on the market: tiger foetus wine.
Glue made from tiger bones is described as a “miracle medicine” that enhances virility. Chau Doan, one of Vietnam’s most prominent investigators, goes undercover in the documentary to buy tiger glue from a well-known Vietnamese dealer. He wryly points out that men’s “obsession” with sexual performance is driving the destruction of the jungle’s most powerful animal.
A 100g bar of tiger glue goes for $700. So at $7,000 a kilo, Kane points out, tiger bone is worth more in Asia than cocaine is in South America. One adult tiger can be made into 12 blocks of tiger glue. That’s about $84,000 per tiger – without including the skin. One basement in Vietnam can sell up to seven tigers a day. Given the high cost of raising tigers, farms have a vested interest in promoting demand – either buy pressuring the government or by exploiting buyers.
TRAFFIC is the leading NGO working on trade in wildlife. Richard Thomas, head of communications, explains that the money involved can’t be easily verified, but that clearly tiger traffickers consider it a risk worth taking given the potentially severe penalties. The overall illegal wildlife trade is worth about $19bn. And, as Warner puts it, “The money moves.”
It’s clear that cash from tiger farming is flowing into Europe. In 2018, tiger-farming operations with links to organised crime in Vietnam were exposed in the Czech Republic. Where the money ends up is the critical question. Tracking financial flows associated with wildlife crime has become a hot topic in recent years – even in China.
The documentary
Warner is something of a trafficking expert. In fact, this is her 11th trafficking film. Over her 20-year career, the award-winning investigative journalist, director and cinematographer has tackled the trade in human organs, guns, fake pharmaceuticals, sex and even babies. Warner was the senior producer on the series The Traffickers, winning a Gracie Award for the episode “The Girl in the Window”, which she also filmed and directed.
Warner, 44, tells The Independent that there are certain roles considered to be the domain of women, usually office-based ones – especially after having children. But she has “always been an adventurer”.
“I do think our industry is still sort of catching up with itself. You just need to look at the issues in film – [there are] so few female directors in film and drama. Documentary is one of those safe spaces where I think we’ve been allowed to develop as directors.”
Warner is often away on shoots for weeks at a time, but has two small children at home. She has pumped breast milk in warzones and had airline staff hold a plane so she could make it home in time for the school Christmas play.
She met Kane about 10 years ago, when she was dangling into an active volcano in the DRC while working on Richard Hammond’s Journey to the Centre of the Planet. He was her health and safety expert. Every day, Warner would abseil down into the world’s largest lava lake with all her camera equipment on her back.
Grain Media is known for its wildlife work, and Kane found himself talking with the company co-founder and film director Orlando von Einsiedel about risky stories that needed to be told. They realised that there was a good deal of subject matter about elephants, rhinos and pandas, but that tigers had – in Warner’s words – “just sort of fallen off the radar”.
What do you have to do to apply sanctions on a country which is openly and illegally trading in tigers and tiger parts?
“I think a lot of the reason why this hasn’t made it to the forefront of the conversation is because it’s a really complex subject,” she says. The fact that tigers are being bred legally makes it a harder story to tell than, for example, elephant ivory. The industry exists in this “weird hinterland where governments have created loopholes in the law so that nobody is actually entirely sure what’s legal”.
Although there are programmes in South Africa trying to breed rhinos and lions to fill a quota, tigers are the first animal to really be put through the process. Warner says that there are too many governments enticed by the idea of having a quota system for trading in wildlife. She believes that a quota endangers the animals further because it commodifies them. “I think we need to have an open and frank conversation about how it just doesn’t work, and we need to do it before tigers become extinct.”
Debbie Banks, leader of the EIA’s Tigers and Wildlife Crime campaign, appears in the documentary addressing CITES. Speaking on behalf of all major wildlife NGOs in southeast Asia, she calls for trade sanctions against Laos until it has stopped breeding tigers, finished its audit and punished the criminals responsible. Chinese delegates, meanwhile, lobby the rest of the world to agree to the trade in tiger parts.
A decision is made to give Laos nine months’ grace. In other words, Laos gets let off the hook. “What do you have to do to apply sanctions on a country which is openly and illegally trading in tigers and tiger parts?” Banks exclaims, describing these events as “a win for China”.
Banks tells The Independent: “We’re glad the BBC is exposing the ugly trade in captive-bred tigers and not shying away from showing the public the gruesome truth about the business. These traders are relentless, churning out farmed tiger parts and products, advertising them on their social media platforms. This keeps the market alive, perpetuating the desirability of tiger skins, bones, meat, teeth and claws.”
TRAFFIC’s Richard Thomas says that while stronger enforcement of existing legislation is critical, the only sure-fire way to address the consumption of tiger parts is to change consumers’ minds. “If there’s no demand, there’s no trafficking or poaching.”
Is there still time?
The UK has made promises to address wildlife crime – and a lot of financial commitments to back them up. It even has a dedicated funding scheme for tackling the illegal wildlife trade: Defra’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund.
In 2018, the government convened the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, where Prince William announced the formation of a wildlife crime financial taskforce. The UK has also supported a project through the Defra fund to investigate the shadowy figures behind the tiger trade. The project mapped transnational criminal networks, and the EIA published an interactive map of tiger facilities.
London Zoo opened its Tiger Territory opened in 2013. It’s currently home to one Sumatran tiger, a male called Asim. A spokesperson tells The Independent that the Zoological Society of London (the international conservation charity behind the zoo) is working to tackle the illegal trade of many species, “and we have indeed worked on and continue to work on projects to protect tigers – currently in Nepal and Bangladesh and in Indonesia in the past”.
British people can help by “not visiting facilities that offer the opportunity to have a picture taken with tigers or to cuddle them,” says Banks. “As demonstrated by the scandal around Thailand’s Tiger Temple, these so-called zoos and tiger parks are often hiding a more sinister business.”
In the US, the widespread exotic pet trade encourages the movement of live tigers in and out of the country, and there’s remarkably little control over who owns them and where they are housed – or how they are disposed of. As Thomas says: “If the US took concerted action to regulate its captive tiger populations more strictly, it might be a positive incentive for other nations, such as China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, to support global action.”
There is also a massive Chinese diaspora in the US and Australia, a key market for tiger products. Wherever you have that population spread, Warner explains, people are going to be consuming tiger products, because it’s part of their culture. “There’s a sort of philosophical existential problem, because we breed cows, we breed pigs, we breed chickens – and tigers breed really well. So what’s the problem? The problem is that cows, chickens and pigs are not on the brink of extinction in the wild.”
All tiger-range states are committed to doubling their number of wild tigers by 2022 – the next Year of the Tiger. Nepal, at least, looks set to achieve that commitment. India is also something of a success story: tiger populations are showing signs of increasing after long-term efforts to battle poaching. Thomas calls the subcontinent “the stronghold for the species”. He believes there’s still time to save the wild tiger.
But in southeast Asia, wild tiger numbers are crashing. They are now functionally extinct in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. There are only about 200 left in Malaysia. For the closing sequence of the documentary, shots of Kane walking on the beach are interspersed with the graphic slaughter of a tiger. It is both a warning and a call for help.
Banks says that the UK and other concerned governments must call for China to ban the use of tiger parts – including those from captive-bred animals – and destroy the stockpiles held by captive facilities. “President Xi closed the ivory market in China. He can do the same for tigers and other big cats,” Banks concludes.
“Hopefully Prime Minister Johnson will see the BBC film and champion the tiger’s cause with President Xi. If that fails, then yes, we have to call for trade suspensions under CITES. The tiger is running out of time.”
‘Tigers: Hunting the Traffickers’, by Grain Media, will air on Wednesday 4 March at 9pm on BBC2
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