Word: boning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...market was always there, but in the 1980s it posed little threat to most tiger populations. In previous years China had slaughtered thousands of its tigers, claiming the animal was a pest that endangered humans. The massacre created a temporary glut of tiger bone -- more than enough to satisfy the traditional medicine market. Looking back on what happened next, Peter Jackson, chairman of the cat-specialist group at IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, in Geneva, says ruefully, "We should have seen this coming." Only in the late 1980s, he notes, after the Chinese had exhausted their...
Only last year, however, did officials realize the scale of the slaughter. A sting operation organized by TRAFFIC, an organization that monitors the wildlife trade for the World Wildlife Fund, uncovered a vast poaching network. In one bust last August, New Delhi police found 850 lbs. of tiger bone (equivalent to 42 tigers) and eight pelts. Sansar Chand, a dealer who surrendered last December, has nearly two dozen wildlife cases pending against him. Given the ease with which traffickers can manipulate India's glacial judicial system -- where cases can drag on for decades -- arrest is often only an inconvenience...
...would bag eight or 10 of the cats during a single hunt. But the state exercised iron control over the region, and when it decided to protect the tigers, their population recovered from roughly 30 to as many as 400 during the mid-1980s. Unfortunately for the Amur, tiger-bone prices began surging in the early 1990s, just when the fall of the Soviet Union led to a breakdown of law and order in the taiga...
Demand for tiger bone, however, originates in China, Korea and Taiwan, largely beyond the reach of Western publicity campaigns. Moreover, tiger-bone remedies are so ingrained in these cultures that it is not certain their governments could control the trade in tiger parts. Whether they have the will to try is even more open to question. All three countries have a well- documented history of paying lip service to agreements protecting endangered species while continuing to do business as usual...
...statistics offer rare insight into the size of the market. An analysis by TRAFFIC International revealed that Korea was importing from 52 to 96 dead tigers a year between 1988 and 1992, even as cat populations were plunging around the world. Imports rose in 1990 and 1991, suggesting that bone dealers were stockpiling parts in anticipation of the trade being shut down. Indeed, fearful of international sanctions, Korea finally joined CITES last year and banned tiger imports. But the country has failed to enforce new laws designed to halt the internal trade in tiger parts...