In China, we visited a large, well-resourced facility, open to the public—including tours, gift shops, and more—with over 700 tigers in the heart of bustling Harbin. On this trip through Southeast Asia, we visited a significantly smaller tiger farm that shows just how varied these facilities can be. After driving down winding back roads into the country and stopping several times for directions from friendly residents, we finally arrived at a large but modest property with chickens, beautiful fruit trees, and a dilapidated cinder block structure housing six tigers in five chain-linked kennels.
The remoteness and size of this tiger farm is an example of why this job is so hard;large, commercial facilities in the middle of an urban center are much easier for enforcement to find and regulate, but the proliferation of smaller facilities in rural areas in Southeast Asia, where even close neighbors can't tell you exactly where they’re located, makes the task of stopping the illegal flow of tigers and their parts from these facilities complicated and difficult. We’ve even heard of people keeping and breeding tigers in basements to avoid detection.
Collaborations and challenges
Along with visiting a tiger farm, we worked with our WWF and TRAFFIC network colleagues to more clearly define our strategy towards ending the illegal tiger trade and phasing out tiger farms. In three countries, we built out the details of these strategies and convened with other organizations and government partners to discuss collaboration, just as we had done in China two months earlier.
