Paper Tigers: The Role of the U.S. Captive Tiger Population in the Trade in Tiger Parts

The emergence of a large captive tiger population in China is a recent phenomenon, resulting from efforts to develop a new, legal source of tiger parts to meet an enduring domestic demand for tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine. The United States’ captive Tiger population, by contrast, grew slowly over many years, not for purposes of trade or consumption, but rather because of demand for live cats for exhibitional use, and also to feed a market for people who desire these cats as “pets.”

The ongoing decline of wild tiger populations, coupled with ongoing commercial demand for their parts, led TRAFFIC North America to question whether and how trade pressure might come to affect the U.S. captive tiger population. We speculated that persistent demand for tiger parts, combined with a potentially reduced supply from the wild, might lead those involved in the illegal tiger trade to target the U.S. captive tiger population. We looked at this issue with the end question always being whether and how this possible source of illegal parts might, in turn, impact tigers in the wild.