juniorsenior sent in a heads up for next month’s wildlife trade convention: China thinks they’ve figured out the best way to keep tigers alive. Unfortunately, that’s “tigers” as a species, not “tigers” as individual animals, and the solution is a lot like the heroic cattle rancher’s technique to save cows from extinction. China is expected to propose an amendment to the 14 year old ban on trading tiger parts, presumably at the behest of the operators of Chinese tiger farms, who have an estimated 4000 tigers in captivity with nobody to (legally) sell them to (in contrast, there are only 3000 to 5000 tigers left in the wild.)
China’s arguments are similar to ones regarding the legalization of drugs, in that they both propose that it would be easier and cheaper to obtain the product through legal means, if such avenues where available. Unfortunately, in this case, that decision would come at a price of countless tiger deaths in farms, and I suspect the push to keep the species alive in the wild would fall by the wayside as long as their continued existence was ensured (nobody worries about the wild cow population, for example). This one’s more for the conservationists than the AR crowd: is it worth preserving a species if everything about its lifestyle has to change for the worse?
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