Tag: tiger-bone

With fewer than 4,000 wild tigers remaining across Asia and approximately 30,000 rhinos in Asia and Africa, government leaders must do everything possible to end poaching and trafficking.

At a meeting held with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs in London, the Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, H.E. Liu Xiaoming, gave a speech on Chinese efforts to combat wildlife trade, including the 2016 revision of China’s Wildlife Protection Law

At the forthcoming Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) we will call on world governments to tackle the widespread poaching of leopards driven by the illicit trade in body parts. Besides adopting the draft Decisions on the table, we urge Parties to close domestic markets for big cat parts.

Poaching for trade continues to be the primary threat to the survival of tigers in the wild. It’s a brutal trade targeting some of the world’s most iconic and majestic species, to churn out entirely expendable luxury goods such as tiger skin rugs and expensive wines made from tiger bone steeped in alcohol

China’s experimental trade in the skins of captive-bred tigers has done nothing to relieve pressure on wild tigers – quite the opposite, it has perpetuated the desirability of tiger products and kept the poachers in business acquiring cheaper parts and derivatives from the wild

For the past three years or so, a handful of scientific entrepreneurs have increasingly championed a possible solution to the current appalling levels of rhino poaching. Specifically, several companies have been advocating the use of biotechnology to artificially create rhino horn and then ‘flood’ the market with it