Bred for the freezer: how zoo rears tigers like battery hens :
"Xiongsen is the world's biggest battery farm for rare animals. Located just outside the southern Chinese city of Guilin, it is smaller than 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 £2bn to the Chinese economy and damage to China's traditions and medicinal culture."
"Xiongsen is the world's biggest battery farm for rare animals. Located just outside the southern Chinese city of Guilin, it is smaller than 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 £2bn to the Chinese economy and damage to China's traditions and medicinal culture."
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