April 15, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 26, 1428

GUILIN (Southern China): The padlocked freezer at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village attracts little attention from the tourists who throng to the park each day. Most are more interested in the bloody spectacle of tigers savaging live cows, the monkey bicycle race or the highwire displays by bears and goats. But it is the freezer rather than the freak shows that will soon be at the centre of a fierce international debate on the trade in endangered species.

Xiongsen is the world’s biggest battery farm for rare animals. Located just outside the southern Chinese city of Guilin, it is smaller than London’s Regent’s Park but holds 1,300 tigers — almost as many as the whole of India — as well as hundreds of bears, lions and birds.

The stock is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in China, where consumers pay high prices for remedies, tonics and aphrodisiacs made from rare species. But until now the park has only been able to bank its assets in cold storage because of a ban on tiger products.

All that could be about to change. After a decade of lobbying by Xiongsen, China is preparing to call for a lifting of the ban. Next week it will send its first ever delegation to the Global Tiger Forum in Kathmandu. In June, at a conference in the Hague of signatories to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), it is expected to push the issue. In a paper to Cites, China says the global ban has failed to halt the decline of the wild tiger population, despite a cost of GBP2bn to the Chinese economy and damage to China’s traditions and medicinal culture.

Conservation groups warn that relaxing the ban could be disastrous. According to the World Wildlife Fund there are only 3,500 tigers left in the wild, compared with more than 6,000 in captivity. “This move could mean the end of wild tigers for China and could mean the extinction of many other tiger populations in Asia,” said Grace Gabriel, Asian regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

In China the transformation of this jungle predator into a caged farm animal is even more dramatic. From several thousand in the 1950s there are now only 50 left in the wild. The Amur tiger of north-eastern China is the most threatened subspecies in the world. The captive population has exploded — at Xiongsen alone it has surged from 12 in 1992 to 1,300 today.

To conservationists, though, it is anything but a success story. Hu Hongfu of Traffic, a monitoring group linked to the World Wildlife Fund, says the park is breeding more tigers to blackmail the Chinese government and the international community. “Xiongsen is the worst of the tiger farms. It is run by individuals who breed for money. We have advised them to stop because more tigers mean more problems, but they keep breeding because it puts pressure on the government to lift the ban.”

The park is part farm, part zoo and part circus. Its nursery is the start of a production line that churns out hundreds of tigers each year and ends in the freezer packed with carcasses. In between, most animals spend their lives in hundreds of tiny cages that are lined up in rows around the perimeter wall, each jammed with as many as four animals, which lie around listlessly or pace back and forth between wire and concrete.

More fortunate beasts share a few football pitch-sized enclosures in the main visitor area. Others are trained to perform in the Dream Theatre — a circus where they jump through flaming hoops — or in an outdoor show that also has monkeys riding camels and a bear cycling across a highwire without a safety net.

For most of the hundreds of tourists who come each day the most memorable part of their visit is feeding time, when a tiger is released into a pen with live cattle.

Earlier this week tourists gasped but watched in fascination as the predator chased down a cow, sinking its teeth and claws into its victim, which cried and defecated in pain and fear.

The bloody spectacle lasted 15 minutes before the tiger — too domesticated to kill its prey in such a short time — meekly returned to its cage and the wounded cow was taken away for slaughter by zookeepers. Guides say the mini-hunt is exercise for animals that will one day be released. But this is dismissed as nonsense by conservationists, who say no animal from Xiongsen will ever be fit for the wild.

“This is a farm that speed-breeds as many tigers as possible so that they can make them into products for sale,” said Ms Gabriel. “Their genetic purity is compromised. If they were mistakenly released into the wild they would pollute the wild population.”

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service