More tigers now live in cages than in the wild.
THA BAK, Laos — He was up there somewhere, at the top of the hill, the man Karl Ammann had come to see. It would soon be night. The forest was all shadows and sounds. Ammann had driven across the country to reach this remote river village, and now he was finally here, looking to the top of the hill, ready to confront the person he believed had murdered more tigers than anyone in Laos. In the distance, he could hear them: dozens of tigers roaring.
For nearly five years, Ammann, 70, a Swiss counter-trafficking conservationist, had tracked the tiger butcher, a man named Nikhom Keovised. He had placed hidden cameras inside what had once been the largest tiger farm in Southeast Asia, an illegal operation where tigers had been raised to one end — slaughter — and where the man doing the slaughtering had been Nikhom. And he had listened to Nikhom describe it all in his own words: “Use the anesthetic,” he had said. “Then just cut the neck.” Then “peel its skin.”
-snip-
Over the past century or so, the tiger population has plunged in the wild, dropping from an estimated 100,000 to fewer than 4,000, while the number in captivity had exploded to more than 12,500. Nowhere else was the animal’s commodification more complete than in tiger farming, where it is raised, butchered for parts and sold for tens of thousands of dollars. And nowhere else had these farms operated with greater impunity than in Laos, an obscure communist nation whose own wild tigers have nearly all been killed. Ammann was one of the few people who’d seen inside the country’s farms.
When I’d first spoken to him in June of last year, I’d expected to find someone who was, if not optimistic, then at least hopeful. In a smattering of countries in South Asia, the tiger’s population appeared to be stabilizing, even as it cratered elsewhere. And since 2016, international authorities and some conservationists had applauded Laos, home to some of Asia’s biggest wildlife traffickers, as it announced overhauls to finally clean up the trade. Shops trading in bones and wildlife merchandise were to cease. All three of the country’s illegal tiger farms, which stored 700 tigers, were ordered to stop farming and convert into zoos and conservation centers. No new facilities breeding endangered wildlife for commercial purposes would open. From the outside, things seemed to be getting a bit better. Even Britain’s Prince William had reportedly taken up the cause.
But Ammann was neither optimistic nor hopeful, and, if anything, seemed offended by the suggestion. In our first substantive phone conversation, he immediately plunged into the arcana of tiger farming in Laos, citing operational tiger farms and going on and on about “lip service” and how we were being taken for “bloody fools.” While Ammann vented, I searched for images of him. He looked the same in every one: mustachioed and grimacing, an expression of the frustration and futility in his voice.
-more-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/tiger-farms-poaching-laos/?utm_term=.3f668d8f6a05&wpisrc=al_special_report__alert-world--alert-national&wpmk=1