Tomorrow is the Chinese New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Tiger in the cyclical 12-year Chinese Zodiac. In the bitterest of ironies, it will, almost certainly, be the last Year of the Tiger during which real, live, tigers still stalk the dwindling wild places of the world. And the Chinese themselves will be to blame.
There are, at last estimation, approximately 3,200 wild tigers of various species still abroad in the world, mostly in India, though some still hang on in Siberia and Indochina. They are, everywhere, a waning beast, moving inexorably towards extinction, like so many living things on this planet. Yet unlike the snail darter or the Wyoming toad, endangered in their own right, the tiger has always held men under a spell.
Lithe, deadly, proud, painted in the colors of a sunset through the trees: the tiger is perhaps most charismatic of charismatic mega-fauna, most beautiful and entrancing of all animals. Few other creatures have the ability to create such frisson in the hearts of man, to both entrance and terrify in equal measure. The tiger is the living embodiment of the wild, of the power, danger, grandeur, and grace that nature can bring forth.
And the Chinese, almost single handedly, are well into the process of wiping them out.
Colonial guilt throws up its own caveats, of course, about how the British in imperial India slaughtered countless tigers themselves, or about how white hunters had long massacred the big cats for the sheer 'sport' of it. This is true. Habitat loss is another nail in tiger's coffin as well, as human populations in India and southeast Asia continue to swell. But today's single biggest threat to the tiger comes from China, and the twisted and ignorant tastes of the Chinese people.
Chinese 'cultural' medicine places great value on the bones and various parts of tigers, as well as those of other animals. 'Bone wine', rice wine laced with powdered tiger bone, is held in high esteem as a curative, and tiger penis has a reputation as an aphrodisiac. The crass nouveau riche of Chinese society also take great pride in displaying tiger skin rugs, which they view as garish ways of showing how far they've come from the peasant dirt-farmers they were, but a generation past. The hungers, both literal and figurative, of the Chinese not only propel the global black market for wild tiger parts, but create it entirely.
Yet there aren't even enough wild tigers left to sate the greed of the Chinese, and so they have turned to 'farming' tigers, a practice as reprehensible and blasphemous as it sounds. To take the very synthesis of the wild and cage it is bad enough; to do so for the express purpose of superstitious consumption is as close to a sin as one can get. The following article in the Times offers a perfectly brutal snapshot of the practice: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13tiger.html?ref=world
To say I'm sickened by the circumstances is an understatement. The cynical realist in me understands with dread clarity that poachers will erase tigers entirely from the wild before the Chinese Zodiac again comes full circle. And yet I'd almost rather have tigers extinct than to have them linger on as a mistreated and farmed species, bred and eaten to please the backwards traditions of the misbegotten Chinese race. I'm exhausted from caring, exhausted by my own powerlessness, exhausted from being limp-wristedly politically correct with regards to the Chinese, who deserve nothing but contempt for any number of reasons, this being only chief among them. I'm depressed by the thought of a world where Blake's fearful symmetry has no natural expression. I'd happily trade a million Chinese for the life of a single wild tiger, burning so brightly in the forests of the night and of the imagination. If that sounds inexcusably misanthropic, racist even, I don't care any more. The fiercest, most striking, most exquisite wild thing in the world is being snuffed out, and if you aren't as filled with righteous anger by that as I am, then I've no respect for your opinions anyways.
So here we are, on the eve of the Year of the Tiger, the last till 2022, a year in which tigers will almost certainly be relegated to zoos and farms, kept for the amusement and superstitious hungers of mankind. In the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou I'm sure they'll be dancing and drunk on rice wine. Me, I don't see anything worth celebrating. This is not a happy New Year.
