Picture of Tiger (Panthera tigris)

Tiger farms in China somehow remain in business despite an international ban on tiger products. These farmers are now pushing heavily to resurrect the tiger trade within China, to make legal what they must already be doing in order to stay afloat. Legitimizing the tiger market would be an enormous boon to tiger poachers because there is no way to tell farmed tiger products from poached tiger products, and even accounting for the risks of smuggling, poaching costs a mere fraction of farming.

Some argue that the number of tigers in China has risen sharply while the number of tigers in India continues to fall, and that these numbers support the need for tiger farms. This argument is seriously flawed however in that it gives farmed tigers the same conservation status as wild tigers. Tigers in cages are not the same as tigers in the wild. If they were, zoos would have had the tiger conservation problem solved long ago.