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Tigers in India, which contains half of the world’s surviving population, face extinction unless an illicit skin trade run by criminal gangs between the subcontinent and Tibet is brought under control, campaigners said.
In a report the Environmental Investigation Agency and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) said the Himalayan plateau had become a massive bazaar for Indian tiger skins. Pelts are sold for $20,000 each and it has become fashionable for them to be used in luxury clothes and accessories.
Running skins across the roof of the world are organised criminal syndicates, which buy from poachers in India and send the contraband through Nepal into Tibetan markets where wealthy Chinese line up to buy feline hides and coats.
India’s big cat population has been whittled away by a combination of habitat destruction, loss of prey and conflicts with humans. But this trend is being accelerated by the tiger skin trade. The result, say conservationists, has been that tigers are being wiped out in India.
Just before independence in 1947 India’s wild tiger population was 40,000. It has dropped to 1,500. “We have to urgently curb the slaughter otherwise we are certainly heading for a situation where India will have no tigers,” said Belinda Wright of WPSI. “This is an illegal trade much like the criminal arms trade or drugs trade. It has to be controlled and stopped by specialised enforcement units.”
The scale of the problem is daunting. Despite the international ban on the tiger trade and the fact that the trade is illegal under Chinese law, undercover investigators went to Tibet and filmed shops in Lhasa which displayed tiger skins for sale.
— The Guardian
Randeep Ramesh
