Italian police are investigating after one of the country’s most famous tamers was killed by four tigers he was training.
Ettore Weber died Thursday evening during a rehearsal at Marina Orfei Circus in Triggiano, Bari, Italian newspaper Repubblica reported.
Police said they think one tiger bit Weber, prompting the other three to attack. The animals mauled the tamer for some 20 minutes, according to Notizie.it.
Some 118 people tried to rescue Weber, but he died from his injuries. He was in his early sixties.
Weber’s show was part of the circus’s “Animal Park” event, which featured live animals from five continents. It was due to run from June 15 to July 14. The circus did not immediately respond to Newsweek‘s request for comment.
File photo: A tiger jumps through a flaming hoop at a circus. An exotic animal tamer has been killed by four tigers he was training.GETTY
Weber’s death provoked fierce criticism on social media of circuses that feature wild animals. One Twitter user wrote: “Animals have to stay where nature puts them, stop. You can’t torture them for your own profit and delight.”
Sofia Marinelli@TopaM79
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Procura di Bari apre inchiesta per ricostruire l’incidente a Ettore Weber, domatore del circo Orfei, ucciso da una tigre durante le prove a Triggiano. Che vuoi ricostrui’? Un animale selvatico, per quanto addestrato, resta selvatico. Se lo tratti da giocattolo ci scappa il morto.
Gianluca #IoBalloConLaura@Gianluc54410558
Gli animali devono stare dove la natura li mette, stop. Non puoi torturarli per il tuo profitto e diletto.
User Lello Pinto called those who run circuses with wild animals “beasts.” “A decent parent doesn’t take their children to see animals behind bars,” Pinto added.
User Katerina Medici said she was not “at all” sorry about the tragedy. “This is not their natural habitat,” she wrote. “Let these animals go free.”
“Karma is a b****,” tweeted another user. “Another reason not to use animals in circuses.”
Bari, tigre sbrana addestratore al Circo Orfei e lo uccide: tragedia durante le prove
Tragedia al Circo Orfei allestito nelle campagne di Triggiano, vicino al centro commerciale Bariblu. Secondo quanto appreso una tigre, durante le prove dello spettacolo, ha azzannato il suo addestr…
fanpage.it
See Taltos ‘s other Tweets
User Paola Massari said she was “dismayed, of course,” but added: “This could also be an opportunity to stop exploiting, segregating and mistreating exotic animals.”
But some Twitter users hit back at critics. One said those “rejoicing” over Weber’s death wouldn’t do the same if he was their own friend or relative. The user added: “If you are so opposed to the mistreatment of animals in the circus, why don’t you actually take action?”
G I O@mccharmlypaul
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Siete di una piccolezza infinita, voi che esultate per la morte di un uomo sbranato da quattro tigri. Immagino che avreste fatto la stessa cosa se al suo posto ci fosse stato vostro padre, vostro figlio, un vostro parente o un vostro amico. #circo#ettoreweber
G I O@mccharmlypaul
Se siete così contrari al maltrattamento degli animali nel circo, perché non vi attivate concretamente? Al posto di scrivere “godo”, “se lo è meritato”, “finalmente”.
Italy’s parliament voted to phase out animal circus acts in November 2017, with a requirement that new legislation be outlined within a year. Campaign group Animal Defenders International hailed the move as “a major breakthrough” for animal rights.
In the U.S., some states have banned the use of exotic wild animals in circuses. When New Jersey governor Phil Murphy signed such a bill into law last December he said he was proud his state would no longer allow animals to be “exploited and cruelly treated.” He added: “These animals belong in their natural habitats or in wildlife sanctuaries, not in performances where their safety and the safety of others is at risk
Tiger numbers have plunged in the wild in mainland Southeast Asia while the number of animals in farms has soared. Photo: iStock
Life is bleak for tigers during ‘selfie era’ when trade in bone and parts has caused an explosion in captive-breeding and a plunge in numbers in the wild
ByJIM POLLARD
Mainland Southeast Asia has a tiger problem. Numbers are going in completely the opposite direction that officials and animal lovers want – plunging in the wild and soaring in captivity.
Rampant mass tourism and use of tiger bone and parts in products boasting Chinese medicinal “benefits” has put a high price on these iconic animals. Never has this magnificent animal been so threatened and exploited.
A panel of experts outlined the status of tigers at a forum in Bangkok this week, detailing a disturbing outlook in Thailand and neighboring countries.
“There are no tigers in northern Laos anymore. And only perhaps two or three left in northern Myanmar,” said Tim Redford, a program director and wildlife veteran with Freeland Foundation. “The landscape has been changing very rapidly. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam there are either no tigers or viable breeding populations.
“And in Thailand, there are no conclusive recent census results, but we know that until recently tigers used to be in about 20 forest complexes. However, they can only be found now in perhaps three. It is very bleak now.”
In Indonesia two subspecies had gone extinct, he said. But there was some good news. In India, the number of tigers in the wild has risen to about 2,226 with a new census about to confirm exact figures, thanks to strong government policies such as proper funding of national parks and good work by forest and conservation groups. But even so, 51 Bengal tigers were poached in the first five months of this year.
A slide at the panel discussion shows images of tiger abuse in Thailand. Photo: Annelie Langerak.
Roads threaten forests
But a range of factors such as social media and big infrastructure projects like China’s Belt and Road Initiative were threatening to divide some of the region’s last forest complexes into small fragments “and that hastens their demise,” Redford said. “So where we have tigers, they may not be there in a few years time.”
“Poachers are traveling from Vietnam to Sumatra and Malaysia to hunt tigers. And in Laos and Thailand we see the poachers writing on trees, marking out their territory,” he said, showing a slide of a man carrying an AK47.
Redford was deliberately vague about parks or locations in Thailand where tigers could be found, warning that “social media is guiding poachers into areas where they are.”
Thailand’s Department of National Parks was doing a very good job, he said, training rangers and boosting their capacity by bolstering their forensic skills, as shown in the notorious ‘Black panther case,’ involving a wealthy industrialist caught and charged with hunting in a wildlife sanctuary in Kanchanaburi in February 2018.
But Laos and Myanmar were “lagging behind,” he said. And others noted that officials in Laos often failed to collaborate effectively with their counterparts in adjacent countries.
Panelists discuss the plight of tigers at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok on June 19, 2019. From left: Edwin Wiek, Somsak Soonthornnawaphat, Tim Redford and Chris Perkins. Pic: Annelie Langerak
New Thai law
Edwin Wiek, founder and director of the Wildlife Friends Foundation of Thailand, said the best news was that the Thai government recently upgraded the 27-year-old Wildlife Preservation Act and the new law would come into force in a few months. The new law had tougher penalties and the option for civil cases – fines of up to 2 million baht (US$64,800) for loss of biodiversity, and up to 10 years jail for people convicted of serious wildlife crimes.
But he said: “Tourism is becoming a massive problem.” There were more than 44 places with tigers and they were often kept in small cages. He showed a short video of a tourist poking a tiger with a stick at one attraction.
Thailand featured prominently in a report by National Geographic this month on the “dark side of wildlife tourism,” with pictures of distressed animals at a notorious crocodile farm and zoo near Bangkok, which caters to busloads of Chinese tourists, plus other sites which activists say should be improved so tigers, elephants and other animals enjoy less onerous conditions.
Wiek said that in 2007, CITES, the world body overseeing the trade in wildlife and flora, called for an end to the captive breeding of tigers. However, it was a non-binding resolution that some Asian countries opposed and the number of tigers in captivity had soared since then, from about 600 to close to 2,000 in 69 facilities across Thailand, including many new ‘farms’ in the far northeast near Laos.
There was also a special economic zone in northern Laos backed by Chinese investors and politicians, plus facilities on either side of the Mekong that appeared to have many hundreds of tigers. Some of these facilities had zoo permits but conservationists regarded them more as ‘safe-houses’ for illegal wildlife trading.
These sites were suspected to be linked to a huge trade in lion and tiger bones, which he said was marketed as traditional medicine with health benefits and sold to Vietnamese and Chinese tourists for considerable sums.
Wiek said there was concern that tiger farms were having an impact on tigers in the wild as the trade in parts had increased the animals’ value, particularly for male tigers and cubs.
A tiger yawns while a piglet stands beside it at Sriracha Tiger Zoo, in Chonburi province, Thailand, in June 2016. Photo: Reuters/Chaiwat Subprasom/File photo
‘Selfies’ with tigers
Somsak Soonthornnawaphat, the head in Thailand of World Animal Protection, said his group wanted a ban on tourists riding elephants, people taking “selfies” with tigers and dolphin shows.
He voiced concern about the millions of tourists coming from China and East Asia and the fact “animal attractions are in high demand.” Thailand had at least 180 elephant venues, he said, plus several dozen parks where “over 600 tigers suffer from tourist activities.”
His group believed that animals should be free from hunger and thirst; pain, injury and disease; discomfort (no chains around elephants’ ankles); able to express normal behavior (not separated from their mother); and free from fear and distress.
“Life is totally different when tigers are living in captivity,” he said, noting that most of the tigers in captivity in Thailand were actually Bengal tigers from South Asia or hybrid animals bred for profit, not conservation.
Thailand has dozens of facilities where tourists can be in a picture with tigers. Image: Annelie Langerak
Chris Perkin, the regional manager for Thailand and central Asia for the UK Border Force, said the British government took wildlife crimes – such as black market trade in rhino horn, pangolins and ivory – very seriously, because it was a major facet of organized crime, worth more than $21 billion a year globally.
“People forget that at least 150 rangers are killed every year – that’s three a week – by poachers in parks and sanctuaries around the world,” he said. Authorities used high-profile figures such as Prince Charles and tennis star Andy Murray to promote their work countering wildlife trading at key sites such as Heathrow Airport.
Thai wildlife officials load a tiger on a truck after they took it from an enclosure at the Tiger Temple west of Bangkok in May 2016. The center was accused of selling off big cats for slaughter. Photo: AFP / Christophe Archambault
Wiek, who was an adviser on a committee that helped the Prayut government update the wildlife law, said Thailand may do better to have a specific police unit, plus specialist prosecutors and an environmental court to handle wildlife crimes because results in many high-profile cases had been hugely disappointing.
Cases such as dozens of orangutans found smuggled from Borneo at a key tourist facility in Bangkok, plus the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, had attracted huge media attention but neither site ended up losing its permit to operate.
But he said it was very difficult to change the status quo when thousands of people are employed in jobs linked to animal parks set up for tourists.
Perkin said it was important for officials in Thailand and other countries to recognize that failing to treat animals well would hurt their reputation around the world.
Other panelists agreed, saying venues need to be more animal-friendly and run by people with ethical values.
The haul is estimated to be worth £100,000 on the blackmarket (Image: TRAFFIC)
Wildlife crime-busters say the tiger skins, along with a clouded leopard pelt, bear claws and goat horns, were seized during a raid close to one of the Far East’s most famous national parks.
The haul is estimated to be worth £100,000 on the blackmarket.
Malaysian wildlife department officials displayed the dozens of protected animal body parts as they gave details of an operation that saw six Vietnamese nationals arrested near Taman Negara.
At nearly 130 million years old, Taman Negara is the world’s oldest living rainforest and is home to vital proportion of Malaysia’s 250-340 remaining tigers.
Datuk Hashim, director general of the Malaysia’s wildlife and national parks department, said: “From the size of the skins it seems like this was one family of tigers.
“We estimate around three tigers were killed. We will be checking against camera trap photos of tigers in the area to see if these skins came from animals in the area.”
In total, 61 animal parts were seized during the raid on a property 30 minutes’ drive from the park.
Besides two tiger skins, there were 10 smaller pieces of tiger skin, a clouded leopard skin, seven bear teeth, 20 bear claws, four horns from serow, an antelope-like goat, several serow tails, 12 wild boar teeth, python skin and 85lb of meat.
Wire snares were also found during the operation.
The suspects are like likely to face charges of illegal possession of protected wildlife and using illegal snares.
In total, 61 animal parts were seized during the raid (Image: TRAFFIC)
Tiger offences carry mandatory prison sentences.
Malaysia is cracking down on the use of snares to capture wild animals, having seized more than 560 of the deadly devices in recent months.
A study by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, shows Malaysian enforcement agencies have seized the parts equivalent to 103 poached tigers since 2000.
More recently, the wildlife department recovered two dead big cats in 2016 and also rescued a third from a snare.
TRAFFIC say this latest operation is not the first case of Vietnamese nationals being caught in Malaysia with tiger parts.
Animals on the edge of extinction
Fri, January 23, 2015
Over 4,600 species of animals and plants are on the edge of extinction and could be wiped out within the next decade, according to a leading global environment organisation. We take a look at some of these beautiful animals.
Despite increased efforts in tiger conservation—including law enforcement and antipoaching capacity—a substantial market remains in Sumatra and the rest of Asia for tiger parts and products.
Last year, wildlife department officials stopped a suspect with 17 pieces of tiger claw and eight tiger teeth.
Two years ago eight Vietnamese nationals were arrested during a series of raids that seized hundreds of wildlife parts, including tiger skins, pangolin scales and hornbill casques.
Kanitha Krishnasamy, acting regional director for TRAFFIC in Southeast Asia, said: “This is a significant seizure and we congratulate Perhilitan (the wildlife department) on their successful investigations, but this loss is heartbreaking for Malaysia’s wild tigers.
“We urge the federal government to act with urgency and support ongoing efforts to keep Malaysia’s national symbol, as well as the national parks where they roam, free from poachers,” she said.
As few as five tigers still roam free in Vietnam yet there is heavy demand for tiger bones to make traditional medicines.
Wine made from tiger cubs and body parts is also popular as well as skins and claws which are highly prized as jewellery.
The following was originally posted in 2013. I watched the movie again last night and decided to revisit my impressions from my first viewing…
Film Review and commentary by Jim Robertson
Spoiler Alert:
If you haven’t seen the movie, Life of Pi, and you plan to, don’t read this post yet. In discussing what I feel is the story’s theme I will end up revealing some of its major plot points, and I don’t want to spoil the experience just to make a point about ethical veganism…
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Still here? Ok, assuming you’ve seen the film (or read the book on which it’s based), you’ll recall that there are essentially three parts to the story, ending with what many critics felt was a disappointing and even unnecessary “alternate” account of events to explain how Pi survived such a long ordeal at sea. Personally, I didn’t find the ending a disappointment, perhaps because I may have been one of the few people who got the message the movie was trying to make. After reading dozens of reviews fawning over the special effects (the computer generated middle act was indeed amazing) and decrying the ending, I found only one review that saw it the way I did: the “alternate” story (told by Pi to a pair of Japanese Ministry of Transport officials) was really what happened.
Now, you might be thinking, why does it matter; why ruin a fun thing (especially when it looked so astounding through 3-D glasses, so I hear)? To answer that, I’m going to try to make a long story short and hit its key points (many of which were completely missed by most mainstream film critics, and movie-goers).
The film starts off with an introductory act in which we learn about the early life of the main character, Pi, through a series of flashbacks as told to a visiting writer who wants to write his biography. We are told that Pi spent his childhood trying many of the world’s religions on for size, hoping to get to know God (his atheist father tells him, “You only need to convert to three more religions, Pi, and you’ll spend your life on holiday.”) At one point he jokes that as a Catholic Hindu, “We get to feel guilty before hundreds of gods, instead of just one.”
Of note is the fact that Pi is an ethical vegetarian. He’s also fascinated by a tiger (named Richard Parker, after its captor) stuck in a zoo owned by his father. When Pi is caught trying to befriend the captive tiger, his father decides to teach him a lesson by making him watch Richard Parker kill a goat, thus instilling a morbid fear of tigers in the curious boy.
The movie’s second act begins after it’s revealed that the zoo must close and the father decides to move the animals, and his family, by ocean-going freighter across the Pacific from India to Canada. En-route, the ship is swallowed up in a massive typhoon and Pi—according to the version of the story he is telling the writer, as we witness it—is the only human to make it onto a life raft. Somehow some of the zoo animals must have escaped their pens in the ship’s hold, and he finds himself adrift with only an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and Richard Parker—the 500 pound Bengal tiger—for company.
It’s during this portion of the movie that viewers are drawn in by its startling special effects; and it’s also when the main character learns that sometimes the world is no life of pie (my interpretation of the title, as a play on the expression “easy as Pie”).
Driven by hunger, the hyena soon feeds on the zebra and, as it turns on the orangutan, Richard Parker rushes out from under the lifeboat’s only cover (where he has stayed out of sight until now) and quickly dispatches the hyena. This chain of events is essential to the plot since, skipping ahead to the third act, it mirrors Pi’s “alternate” story: substitute the zebra for a deckhand, the orangutan for his mother, the hyena for the cook and Richard Parker for Pi’s alter-ego.
The symbolism here is that after witnessing the cook kill his mother, Pi summons his tiger-inner-self to kill the cook. And eat him. That’s right, to survive his 227 days at sea, Pi had to turn to cannibalism. Incredibly, though it’s critical to the story’s theme, nearly none of the film reviews I read even mentioned cannibalism, since most critics didn’t realize that the second “alternative” version of Pi’s plight was what must have actually happened. I thought it was pretty obvious when an adult Pi asked the writer, “So which story do you prefer?” to which the writer answered: “The one with the tiger. That’s the better story.”And so it goes with God” was Pi’s reply, meaning that, people believe what they want to believe. In order to cope with the sometimes harsh realities of life and death, in this case, resorting to cannibalism for sustenance—and still retain one’s sanity—people often cling to a fantasy world and make up stories which are easier to stomach.
Life of Pi is more than just a happy little special-effects film about a vegetarian boy and a computer-generated, 3-D tiger surviving on computer-generated, 3-D tuna and flying fish. It’s about the kind of anguish any sane person would go through when forced to eat the flesh of another human being. Perhaps the reason I could more easily relate to the story’s deeper meaning (that so many carnivorous critics failed to see) is because, having eaten only plant-based food for the past decade and a half, I feel that same sick revulsion every time I pass the meat isle in the neighborhood grocery store and imagine people actually consuming the flesh so brazenly displayed there.
Borders don’ faze these tigers: over a decade, at least 11 tigers moved from India into Nepal’ protected areas through the Terai, a landscape comprising agricultural areas and protected forest-grasslands in the Himalayan foothills. This reaffirms that tiger conservation requires not just protected areas but corridors too — especially across large landscapes — to ensure habitat connectivity and in turn, population growth.
Habitat loss
With protected areas becoming isolated due to habitat loss and conversion, large mammals including tigers have to now traverse human-dominated areas to disperse to new territories. North India’ Terai Arc Landscape, which shares a 700-km border with Nepal, spreads across more than 50,000 sq. km and has one of the world’s highest human population densities. Apart from agricultural fields and rural settlements, it also comprises 16 protected areas (five in Nepal and 11 in India) and six major trans-boundary corridors which connect Indian wild habitats with Nepal’s.
To test how effectively these corridors aid tiger movement, scientists from WWF-India and WWF-Nepal camera-trapped tigers for 38,319 days in the protected areas, covering an area of more than 9,000 sq. km in multiple surveys between 2005 and 2016. Identifying individual tigers, they found that at least 11 tigers used these corridors to re-colonise Nepal, thus aiding the recovery of tiger populations which had declined drastically in the mid 2000s due to severe poaching pressures.
Growth rates of the tiger population in Nepal’s Suklaphanta and Bardia national parks show that tiger numbers were far higher than would have been possible from just reproduction by the existing population. Connecting the locations that individual tigers were photographed from, the team found that one tiger had moved across an area of 248 sq. km, as opposed to the usual 20-sq. km-area in the Terai.
“This speaks volumes about the need to protect large landscapes, even agricultural ones which serve as crucial corridors,” says Pranav Chanchani, National Coordinator for Tiger Conservation, WWF-India. “Till the 1930s and 1940s, the now-fragmented protected areas were contiguous. But with increasing human settlement large parts of the Terai were cleared and patches that would have been corridors destroyed.”
Planned development near the protected areas — including two roads — could endanger the already-fragmented habitat, say the authors. They suggest that the tiger populations need to be conserved as a ‘metapopulation’, that is, populations that are physically separate, but interact with one another as animals migrate between them, helping populations persist over the years.
Dating app Tinder has called on its users to stop posting pictures of themselves alongside heavily-drugged tigers.
The company has said it is time for the selfies to go, claiming they take advantage of ‘beautiful creatures that have been torn from their natural environment’.
It follows calls from animal rights activists to act on the images, which they say appear frequently on Tinder.
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Animal rights activists have called on Tinder to take action against the number of people pictured posing with tigers
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The pictures ‘take advantage of beautiful animals that have been torn from their natural environment’
Such is their popularity among those looking for love that a number of Instagram accounts have been set up dedicated to sharing screenshots of users who pose with big cats.
The company says it will donate $10,000 to a conservation charity if the pictures disappear.
In a blog post, Tinder wrote: ‘It’s time for the tiger selfies to go.
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In a blog post, Tinder wrote: ‘It’s time for the tiger selfies to go’. It urged people to post pictures of themselves planting trees instead
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Pictures of people posing with tigers are widely shared on Instagram, prompting calls for the practice to end
‘More often than not, these photos take advantage of beautiful creatures that have been torn from their natural environment. Wild animals deserve to live in the wild.
‘We are looking to you, as part of our Tinder community, to make a change. Take down your tiger photos, and we will make it worth your while by donating $10,000 to Project Cat in honor of International Tiger Day.’
Instead it encouraged singletons to try and attract partners by showing themselves doing things like planting trees or volunteering at animal shelters.
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A 22-year-old woman poses with a tiger on the popular dating app, which has asked users to take the pictures down
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Some believe that posting pictures of themselves with tigers makes them look well travelled and projects a positive image
And the blog continued: ‘We urge you to take down your tiger photos, tag your friends to do it too, or simply join the conversation on social with #NoTigerSelfies.’
In a letter to Tinder co-founder Sean Rad, animal rights group Peta called for action.
The organization wrote: ‘What might, at first swipe, look like a harmless picture actually means that someone was caged, dominated, and tied down or drugged before their photo was taken and uploaded online.
‘If this happened to one of your users on a Tinder date, you’d block the profile of the person responsible immediately. Unfortunately, this is the reality for tigers, lions, and other big cats who are featured in an alarming number of Tinder profile photos.’
And it continues: ‘Not only are these types of photos cruel to animals, unaware Tinderlings might also mistake them for cute, harmless pictures and be prompted to take part in this abusive industry themselves.’
While some Twitter users congratulated Tinder for taking a stand, another wrote: ‘This.. is really stupid. #NoTigerSelfies is just this organization virtue signalling. It does nothing.’
BEIRUT – Three Siberian tiger cubs destined for a zoo in war-torn Syria were rescued by a Lebanese animal rights group after being trapped in an unmarked, maggot-infested crate in Beirut’s airport for almost a week.
The tigers, which were being transported from Ukraine, arrived at the Beirut airport on March 7, inside a ventilated 0.3-cubic-meter (10.6-cubic feet) crate, where they could not stand or move and were forced to urinate and defecate on each other, according to Animals Lebanon.
The animal rights group, which had been alerted to the shipment ultimately bound for Samer al-Husainawi Zoo in Damascus before it landed in Beirut, petitioned a Lebanese judge to release the tigers into their care the following week, Executive Director Jason Mier said.
The judge responded by issuing an order demanding the tigers be released, citing concerns for their health and welfare, the group said.
“Once we finally got them out of the box, the box had dozens and dozens of maggots crawling around in it. There were maggots all over the back thighs of the animals and around their anus,” Mier said. The tigers also suffered from dehydration, according to the group.
The tigers were sent from the zoo in Mykolaev, Ukraine. Volodymyr Topchiy, that zoo’s director, said the deal to send them abroad was entirely legal.
“They passed customs clearance, we have customs declarations,” he said, adding that the tiger cubs were exchanged for some wildcats.
Topchiy believes problems with paperwork and bureaucracy stopped their transfer to Syria. “On the transportation boxes there were no ‘up’ or down’ signs,” he said.
He said the three tiger cubs were in one box, not separate, and the zoo dealer was stopped because of these reasons. “Authorities wanted to confiscate (the cubs),” he said.
Mier said the crate arrived with no markings and no documents, and did not meet IATA regulations nor those of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, despite the fact that the four-month-old Siberian tigers fall under that category.
This is not the first deal that the Mykolaev zoo has made with its Syrian counterpart, and Topchiy said he is considering sending more tiger cubs there.
Lebanon enacted an animal protection and welfare law in 2015, granting animals legal rights and allowing for the regulation and monitoring of all the industries and establishments that use or sell animals to ensure that the animals are not placed in abusive environments.
The country is also a signatory to a number of international conventions regarding animal welfare, such as CITES, the main legislation against wildlife trafficking.
In August 2015, the death of a privately owned lion cub as a result of severe malnourishment prompted the Agriculture Ministry to clamp down on the sale and ownership of big cats.
In July, the ministry issued a decree to stop the trafficking of big cats and forcing zoos to register formally.
14 March 2017, 1:00 pm EDT By Kalyan Kumar Tech Times
China is setting up a mega national park of international standards to house endangered species including Siberian tigers and Amur leopards. According to reports, it will be 60 percent bigger than the Yellowstone National Park in the United States. ( Wikipedia )
China is setting up a mega national park that will rival the Yellowstone National Park of the United States with an area more than 60 percent of the latter. The vast national park will serve as a sanctuary to protect two endangered species — the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.
The national park, modeled on the lines of national parks in the United States, will be located on the border of Russia and North Korea at northeast China’s Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.
The park will cover an area of 14,600 square kilometers (5,600 square miles) and will be 60 percent bigger than Yellowstone in the United States, which is close to 4,000 square miles in terms of area.
Chinese media reported that the plan for the national park has been approved by the central authorities and the “comprehensive plan and pilot for the national park is expected to be carried out before 2020.”
Threat To Siberian Tigers
Notwithstanding the conservation efforts, the number of wild Siberian tigers just increased from 9 in 1998, to 27 in 2015, indicating that the numbers were not encouraging to make the species thrive.
To tighten conservation, China has clamped a ban on logging with curbs on gun licenses. Compared with China’s concerns on falling numbers of Siberian tigers, some 400 of them are living in Russia.
Amur leopards are another endangered species whose numbers plunged below 30 in 2007 because of hunting and human activities.
According to latest data, in 2015, their numbers showed some increase and conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund can take credit for that.
In an update, the WWF said the Amur leopard population had a jump since 2008.
China’s Ecological Initiatives
China decided to start national parks in 2013 after seeing that many endangered species including the Siberian tiger, Amur leopard, giant panda, Tibetan antelope, and Asian elephant required safer habitats.
The Chinese government wanted to develop a national park system of international standards and it roped in Paulson Institute, a Chicago-based research center in 2015.
The government also announced a three-year period to start a series of pilot national park projects in nine provinces. The goal was to address the governance and policy shortfalls in environmental protection while extending conservation efforts to other habitats and ecosystems.
President Xi Jinping has committed a series of environmental reforms to usher in an “ecological civilization,” which clubs economic progress with the sustainability of the environment.
Green Activists Hail National Park
Meanwhile, environmentalists like Dale Miquelle of the Wildlife Conservation Society has welcomed the move. He said the sanctuary will be one of the largest tiger reserves in the world.
“China’s commitment represents an extremely important step in recovering both subspecies in northeast Asia,” Miquelle said.
However, the park is also raising concerns of many urban colonies at Hunchun city in the Jilin province, which is very close to the animals’s range.
Hunchun is a key corridor linking tiger habitats of Russia and China. There the residents are uneasy about the animals getting too close.
In 2016, a Forestry Department spokesman mentioned about a plan to relocate some communities and factories from the national park area to avoid conflict between wildlife and human activities.
According to Fan Zhiyong, WWF’s species program director in Beijing, the park will be a boon to the endangered cats and also protect the unique biodiversity of the northern temperate zone.
Attractions Of Yellowstone Park
In the United States, the Yellowstone National Park is spread across the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
It covers an area of 3,468.4 square miles (8,983 km2) and comprises lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges. The Yellowstone Lake is a high-elevation lake centered around the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano in North America.
The National Park is home to thousands of species including mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles, many of which are endangered. The vast forests also house many unique species of plants.
We all grew up knowing tigers as the quintessential “King of the Jungle.” These awe-inspiring big cats captivated us with their gorgeous stripped coat, gorgeous eyes, and terrifyingly beautiful teeth. Sadly, despite our fascination and admiration, we are rapidly losing these animals. It is estimated that the world’s tiger population has declined 95 percent in the past century alone. Like many other species, these animals are endangered by dwindling habitat and human development, but tigers also face a host of other horrific problems. The illegal wildlife trade is the key driver of tiger extinction.
Tigers have gone from being viewed as a majestic and vital wild species to nothing more than a lucrative commodity. We’ve watched the rise of “tiger cub” selfie attractions in the U.S. and across the world and the fact that there are currently more captive tigers in U.S. backyards, kept as pets, than there are in the wild, speaks to how we’ve diminished these creatures. But it seems that this exploitation of tigers is not even the worst form that exists.
This photo from Paul Hilton features a captive tiger at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village in China. At this facility, tiger are drugged and restrained so tourists can take photos “punching” the animals.
Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village is one example of a commercial tiger facility where animals are bred, put on display for tourists, and killed to make tiger bone wine – a product that is rumored to “increase sex drive.”
In China, there are as many as 200 operating tiger farms, some of which disguise themselves as “sanctuaries” for the tigers, but they’re really glorified safari parks where animals are forced to perform tricks. In many farms, when the animals are not being used for performances, they are “speed bred.” After a mother gives birth, her cub is immediately taken away – likely to be used as a selfie prop – so that she can breed again as soon as possible. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, tiger farms have a reproduction rate of 1,000.
Hilton explains in the photo caption that there are currently 2,000 tigers living at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village and their tiger wine, which is primarily sold over the internet, is known as the “best in China.”
As the world’s wild tiger population goes extinct, these commercial facilities continue to churn out animals, born for the express purpose of making money. This is hardly the sort of existence owed to the tiger and we are frankly incredibly foolish to even think that this is permissible. Tigers play a vital role in our global ecosystem and as they are removed from the wild, their absence causes trophic cascades that eventually lead back to humans. We need to recognize that the tiger’s future is and always be intrinsically tied to our own. If we are content to let this species die out for the sake of aphrodisiac wine then we may as well go along with them.
But we do not have to accept this fate, instead, we can fight back and help this struggling species recover. There are countless individuals and organizations working to restore tiger habitat and shut down cruel facilities that exploit these big cats. You can help them by supporting the work of Panthera, WildAid, and WWF in partnership with the Leonardo Dicaprio Foundation.
One of the best ways you can help save the tiger species is to NEVER visit a facility that holds captive tigers and puts them on display for profit. Many attractions pose as “sanctuaries,” but if you see opportunities to take photos with captive cats or they have breeding programs, chances are they are nothing more than money-making scams. Share this article and encourage to speak up for tigers as well!
We can collectively cause the extinction of the tiger or work together to save them. We don’t know about you – but we’re all for the latter.
The conditions the animals are kept in at Surabaya Zoo are bleak, cruel, and completely inadequate. Many animals are sick and starving, and dozens die every month from bad or inappropriate food, cramped conditions with little to no enrichment, unsuitable environments, forced restraints, poor veterinary attention, and a general lack of animal welfare.
Please support the closure of this zoo, and the relocation of its animals to better facilities in properly managed and funded sanctuaries, where they can be given the full care and treatment that they need and deserve.
Sofia Marinelli@TopaM79
Gianluca #IoBalloConLaura@Gianluc54410558
Taltos@taltos_mxp_yyz
G I O@mccharmlypaul
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