Skin Trade Threatens World's Few Surviving Tigers

HANOI (Reuters) - The world's tiger population has plummeted by 95
percent from the start of the 20th century to as few as 5,000 now and
is further threatened by the lucrative trade in their skins,
officials told a forum Friday.

"Commercial trade of tiger skin stemming out of female fantasy and
vanity appears as a major threat to tigers in most tiger range
countries," said S.C. Dey, general secretary of the Global Tiger
Forum.

In Asia, tiger skins can sell for $ 15,000 while in Vietnam a
skeleton, the bones widely believed by Asians to be an aphrodisiac,
can fetch as much as $ 25,000.

"It is believed that about 100 years back, the global population of
wild tigers was about 100,000," Dey said. "However, the population
dwindled to 8,000 by 1960. Today it stands at around 5,000 to 7,000."

The forum is an inter-governmental body set up to save the surviving
tigers in the wild in 14 countries including Vietnam, Myanmar, India,
Russia, Nepal, China, Bangladesh and North Korea (news - web sites).

Dey said three out of the eight sub-species of tigers were already
extinct - the Bali tiger in 1940, the Caspian tiger in the 1970s and
Javan tiger in the 1980s.

Another sub-species, the South China tiger, could also soon
disappear.

"Whether tigers still exist in North Korea is doubtful and
debatable," he said, noting that statistics were not available.

Officials said illegal poaching of wildlife, especially in large
parts of south and southeast Asia, is to blame for the reduction in
the wild tiger population.

"Illegal hunting of wildlife has not been strictly controlled
resulting in the severely decreased population of tigers in Vietnam,"
said Vietnam Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat.

The number of wild tigers in Vietnam does not exceed 150, he said.

Vietnam had clinched several agreements with neighboring countries,
including China, Laos and Cambodia, to halt trans-border tiger
poaching, he said.

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Posted on SHARE Yahoo group Nov. 27, 2004