Chinese Government Secretly Encourages Tiger Trade, NGO Says

The Environmental Investigation Agency has recently released a new report which states that, despite what they say and what they do when in the public eye, Chinese officials are actually encouraging tiger trade.

To put it in a nutshell, said organization maintains that the Chinese government is merely pretending that it wants to help the species escape extinction, and that their working agenda mainly revolves around creating a demand for this internationally banned and frowned upon trade.

According to the Environmental Investigation Agency, the Chinese government is not as efficient as it ought to be when it comes to destroying tiger bones taken from captive-bred animals, despite its having banned the use of these animal parts back in 1993.

It is the organization's belief that, because these tiger bones are not dealt with accordingly, i.e. they are not destroyed, some of the country's residents end up believing that such trading activities will soon become legal once again, Mongabay informs us.

Furthermore, it appears that the practice of marketing various animal parts is still rather popular in this part of the world, even if ongoing rules and regulations explicitly prohibit it.

“During just several days, EIA [Environmental Investigation Agency] investigators were offered three fresh tiger skins, one leopard skin, one snow leopard skin and big cat bones, teeth and claws,” reads the report released by these conservationists.

Speaking about the findings of this investigation into how the Chinese government is really dealing with the needs to safeguard our planet's remaining tiger population, Debbie Banks, currently employed as the head of the Environmental Investigation Agency's Tiger Campaign, argued as follows:

“The stark contradiction between China's international posture supporting efforts to save the wild tiger and its inward-facing domestic policies which stimulate demand and ultimately drive the poaching of wild tigers represents one of the biggest cons ever perpetrated in the history of tiger conservation.”

As the Environmental Investigation Agency explains, wild tigers can only be saved if all trading activities having to do with buying and selling such animal parts are put an end to.

Thus, it matters very little whether or not these bodily parts come from wild or captive-bred animals as long as the result is that the industry is kept up and running.