GUILIN, China — To the thump of loud dance music, four tigers roll over in succession and then raise themselves up onto their haunches. A man in a shiny blue shirt waves a metal stick at them, and they lift their front paws to beg.
The “show” takes place twice a day in a gloomy 1,000-seat auditorium — empty on a recent afternoon except for one Chinese tourist, two reporters and a security guard, its uneven floorboards, broken seats and cracked spotlights painting a picture of neglect.
Outside, hundreds of tigers pace in small, scrubby enclosures or lie listlessly in much smaller, concrete and rusted metal cages. An occasional plaintive growl rends the air.
This is the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village in the southern Chinese city of Guilin, one of the country’s biggest tiger farms. It is part of a booming industry that is threatening to drive this magnificent animal toward extinction in the wild, conservationists say, by fueling demand for “luxury” tiger parts.
Encouraged by the tiger farming industry, China’s wealthy are rediscovering a taste for tiger bone wine — promoted as a treatment for rheumatism and impotence — as well as tiger skin rugs and stuffed animals.
That trend, in turn, is making tiger poaching more lucrative across Asia. Wild tigers are cheaper to kill and smuggle across borders than captive bred ones and often preferred by consumers. Farming has removed any stigma from tiger products and undermined global efforts to stamp out the illegal trade.
“The argument put forward by the tiger-farming lobby is that farmed tiger products will flood the market, relieving pressure on wild tigers,” said Debbie Banks of the Environmental Investigation Agency. “This is a ridiculous notion and has turned into a disastrous experiment.”
Tiger numbers globally might have stabilized in recent years, yet they are still perilously low. Wild tigers are dying in record numbers in India, their main habitat, with many killed by poachers to satisfy demand from China.
The next two years could be crucial, environmentalists say. With calls for change increasing both within the country and outside, China is reviewing its 25-year-old wildlife law and asking itself: Will it stand on the side of its domestic tiger-farming lobby, or will it stand on the side of wild tigers and global public opinion?
Under global pressure, China banned trade in tiger bone and rhino horn in 1993, while traditional Chinese medicine practitioners also removed the products from their pharmacopeia. Conservationists say the moves tamped down demand and helped stabilize the population of Siberian tigers in north Asia.
But by then, China’s tiger-farming industry was beginning to take off.
Tigers are easy to breed in captivity, and their numbers went from a handful to a few hundred and then thousands. Today, there are thought to be between 5,000 and 6,000 tigers on about 200 farms in China, mostly born into captivity and many kept in appalling conditions — compared with less than 4,000 of the animals left in the wild.
Among them are Siberian (or Amur), South China and Bengal tigers.
Chinese wildlife officials have been campaigning for international approval to lift the ban on tiger bone use, arguing that the country has a right to use its “domestic natural resources” as it sees fit.
Even as the rest of the world disagrees, it appears that China has simply gone ahead anyway. Multiple probes by the EIA and International Fund for Animal Welfare over the past decade, together with The Washington Post’s own investigation, show the tiger bone wine industry has boomed.
“After these farms started selling wine, and taxidermists started selling tiger pelts, it really stimulated waning demand from consumers,” said Grace Ge Gabriel of the IFAW.
Xiongshen alone says it houses more than 1,000 tigers — although fewer than 200 are available for tourists to view — and 500 bears, legally farmed to extract their bile for a different wine.
It presents itself as a tourist destination, but its bleak animal enclosures and show — where bears also twirl hula hoops around their necks and cycle unsteadily across uneven floorboards, while a goat balances nervously on a high beam with a monkey on its back — barely attract an audience.
In a building on the compound, the farm’s real money-spinner is on sale. Bottles of wine, in the shape of tigers, list as a main ingredient the bones of “precious animals” and of African lions.
Even the name on the bottle — “tonic bone wine” — uses a Chinese character that rhymes with the word for tiger. Everything is designed to tell consumers this is tiger bone wine, without saying so.
Across town, retailers are more open, boasting that the tiger-shaped bottles do indeed contain wine in which tiger bones have been steeped. A bottle left to mature for three years sells for the equivalent of $80, six years for $155, while a vintage eight-year wine retails for $290.
Even more grisly than the trade in wine and skins was a report from Leizhou in southern China in March that police had busted a gang who would slaughter tigers in front of a paying audience of local officials and businessmen.
At least 10 were killed on separate occasions, according to police. They would then be sold for parts and meat, a prized delicacy at some banquets.
