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Recent investigations by wildlife organisations reveal that a new breed of wealthy Tibetans who prize tiger skins as trimmings for their traditional costumes pose the latest and biggest threat to the tiger, which is fast heading towards extinction. Until recently, tiger bones used by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine were thought to be driving the poaching trade.

The disappearance of the tiger from one of India’s premier sanctuaries Sariska has been attributed mainly to poaching. Hearing rumours that the new Tibetan trend for skins was behind a rapid increase in the activity, a team from the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) visited Tibet and China’s Sichuan and Gansu provinces in August.

There they found a staggering market for the animal skins -- much of which are being used for costumes and ceremonial events.

Belinda Wright, executive director of the WPSI said the time for scaremongering was over. “This is it. The end is now in sight for the Indian tiger. The sheer quantities of skins for sale are beyond belief. As the Sariska scandal so clearly showed, the Indian tiger is now being systematically wiped out.”

At horse festivals in Tibet and Sichuan, dancers, riders and spectators wandered about openly wearing the traditional chuba, generously trimmed with tiger and leopard skin, while organisers and local officials joined in.

The skins are smuggled along well-established Nepali trading routes into Tibet where they are sold openly in shops in the capital Lhasa. Using hidden cameras, Wright, who spent 35 years involved in tiger conservation efforts in India, toured the centre of old Lhasa posing as a buyer. “In 10 shops we found 24 tiger skin chubas, most of them decorated with great swathes of skin, and all openly displayed for sale.

“In 20 other shops, we recorded 54 leopard skin chubas. The dealers categorically told us that they had come from India. When we asked, we were shown three fresh tiger skins and seven fresh leopard skins in four different locations -- again, all from India.”

In one street in Linxia in China, around 60 snow leopard skins and 160 fresh leopard skins were openly displayed -- with many more rolled up in the back of shops. “We found over 1,800 otter skins, which are also used to decorate the costumes,” said Wright. “The quantity and blatant display of tiger and leopard skins in Tibet and China demonstrates a lack of awareness among customers about the plight of the tiger and the urgent need for targeted enforcement to stop traders from smuggling and illegally selling the animal skins,” she added.

What was perhaps most distressing was the apparent lack of concern among Tibetans wearing these chubas. In Sichuan’s Litang, Wright talked to a 21-year-old as he sat in his tent swathed in a fresh tiger skin that had cost his father about UK£ 6,700. “He said that he would wear it just twice a year -- during the Tibetan New Year and at the annual horse festival -- even though he said he didn’t particularly like it. “I asked him how wearing a dead animal’s skin could be compatible with his Buddhist religion, but he had no explanation except to say ‘I didn’t kill the tiger’,” Wright said.

Huge seizures of tiger, leopard and otter skins in India and Nepal show the existence of highly organised criminal networks behind the skin trade. They operate across borders, smuggling skins from India through Nepal into China, and continue to evade the law. Wildlife experts accuse the Indian and Chinese governments of seriously underestimating the scale of the problem and, through a mixture of corruption and bureaucratic inertia, failing to address it.

The EIA and WPSI have called on the Indian government to immediately establish a professional enforcement unit to target wildlife criminals who were controlling the trade, and urged China to take enforcement action to stop the smugglers.

Tigers and leopards are listed in Schedule 1 of the United Nations Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), thereby prohibiting international trade. Indian and Chinese laws both ban the killing, smuggling, buying or selling of these animals.

SOURCE:Infochange News and Features