Once in a while tigers make international news, like the white tiger in Las Vegas that mauled illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, or the one that escaped from its confines and killed a teenager at the San Francisco Zoo. Most of the time, though, the news is about tigers being eaten by man.
The latest involves the arrest of a man last month with three dead tigers in the trunk of his car in Nghe An province, Vietnam. He was delivering them to Hanoi where tiger meat is consumed illegally. There a few months earlier a woman was arrested , her second offense for selling tiger meat at her restaurant. It seems the trade proves too lucrative -- $1,000 per 100 grams of tiger meat -- to give up, especially now that there are fewer than 50 tigers left in the wild.
For poachers a tiger could fetch as much as $10,000, and its meat, organs, bones, and skin are sold in restaurants and specialty shops for 10 times the price. As the tiger population dwindles, demand for it is at an all-time high.
Indeed, if there is a cultural matrix in East Asia, it is the longing for what the Chinese call Ye-Wei, or "wild taste." More than a decade ago, I visited Vietnam's border with China at Lang Son. I watched as hundreds of Vietnamese carried baskets of monkeys, pangolins, snakes, and a variety of exotic birds in rattan cages. On the way back, their baskets held electric fans, water pumps, rice cookers, farm tools, TVs, VCRs, jeans and T-shirts. As one young man put it, "I can always sell forest animals to China. They buy everything we have. They have a big appetite for wild taste."
The once ferocious tiger has been reduced to a mere commodity, to be farmed and poached, collected for its parts, and made into balms, pills, soaked in wine. Statistics on the amount of wildlife being eaten are not known, but there are some local guesses. The China Wildlife Conservation Association estimates that 10,000 tons of snakes are consumed a year in China, and several thousand tons of wild birds are consumed in restaurants each year, not to mention badgers, frogs, bats and other wildlife.
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