 Though extirpated from the wild in 1886, tigers are not yet extinct in Pakistan. Specimens pacing in dreary zoo exhibits show visitors a semblance of what wild tigers looked like. Should the captives fail to inspire awe, the names of a cricket team and an insurgent faction recall the status that tigers once commanded.
Tigers readily breed in captivity. Captive tigers may at times forget their wild mating behavior and instead kill each other, as when a Karachi Zoo tiger killed his mate in February 2006, but even if no Pakistan zoo tigers reproduce successfully, replacements may be outsourced, like the two female white tigers who were controversially imported by the Lahore Zoo in 2009.
The real question ahead for tigers is not whether the species will survive, but rather whether tigers in the future will be self-sufficient wildlife or just livestock with fangs.
The Year of the Tiger on the Chinese calendar opened on February 14, 2010 with schemes afoot to "save" tigers that pose perhaps a greater threat to tiger welfare and wild tiger survival than even the aggressive poaching, mostly to supply Chinese medicinal demand, that has cut the world's wild tiger population in half since the last Year of the Tiger in 1998.
For instance, Indonesian director general of forest protection and nature conservation Darori, who uses no surname, proposed that his agency should sell tigers as pets, at the equivalent of $107,100 U.S. apiece.
In view that neotonizing purebred dogs to lack the traits that enable street dogs to survive has taken less than 150 years, despite considerable opportunity for most dogs to engage in random breeding, one may wonder how many generations of the genetically limited captive tiger population might be bred to produce "lap tigers," bearing no more resemblance than lap dogs to their wild ancestors.
"Conservation of wildlife, including tigers, should be taken up as an enterprise," recommended Indian former principal chief conservator of forests S. Parameshwarappa. "Farmed tiger products could be sold to countries like China where there is a demand. Money from this venture can be invested back into conservation," Paramesh-warappa says.
This is no new scheme. Barun Mitra of the Delhi-based Liberty Institute has been flogging it for years. What is new, though, is that now some of the people who have presided over the decline of tigers in the wild are envisioning in tiger farming a way to compensate for their failures.
The Worldwide Fund for Nature meanwhile introduced an Adopt-a-Tiger fundraising theme for 2010. Formerly called the World Wildlife Fund, the Fund is widely credited with helping to "save" wild tigers by financing aspects of the Indian conservation effort Project Tiger.
 Begun in 1973, Project Tiger created 27 national tiger reserves. Project Tiger was for three decades acclaimed as a great success, supposedly doubling the Indian wild tiger population. Since 2004, however, improved tiger censuring techniques have discovered that the supposedly robust tiger populations of reserves including Sariska and Panha had been poached out of existence. Even the tigers of Ranthambore, the most renowned reserve, had become shockingly few. Inevitably, investigation of the tiger losses produced evidence that the Indian wild tiger population had probably never rebounded to anything like the numbers attributed to Project Tiger.
The model of wildlife conservation that the Worldwide Fund for Nature promotes in other parts of the world is based largely on the premise that selling hunting licenses can fund habitat protection. In Africa this model includes selling licenses to shoot captive-reared examples of nominally wild species.
Currently the Worldwide Fund for Nature opposes tiger farming because the existence of legal traffic in tiger parts could stimulate demand and provide cover for trafficking in poached parts. Yet the same argument could be made against African game farming-and, conversely, the case for African game farming is not philosophically far from endorsing tiger farming.
Attendees at the first Asian ministerial conference on tiger conservation, held in Hua Hin, Thailand, in January 2010 resolved to double the wild tiger population before the 2022 Year of the Tiger.
But at least some of the ministers touted the resolution as an invitation to breed even more captive tigers than the thousands who already exist, on the pretext of eventually "re-introducing" some to habitat which mostly no longer exists. Their admitted goal is to remove captive-bred tigers from Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, so that tigers and tiger parts may be freely sold.
The world now has just 3,200 wild tigers, the ministerial conference heard. India, with the wildest tigers, claims 1,411. China, with the fewest wild tigers among nations known to still have any, may have as few as 20, all of them of the far northern Amur subspecies. But, counting captives, China has about four times more tigers than India and three times more than the United States.
"Close to 6,000 tigers have been artificially bred and raised in China," said Yin Hong, vice head of the China State Forestry Administration. China "can breed over 1,000 baby tigers every year," Yin Hong told the China News Service.
Farming tigers allows China to have tigers and eat them, too, in the name of preserving "traditional Chinese medicine." Yet truly traditional Chinese medicine is mostly herbal. The "medicinal" market for wildlife parts, like the bushmeat trade in Africa, exploded to menace entire species mostly after logging, road-building, dam-building, and plantation-clearing throughout Southeast Asia gave poachers unprecedented access to wildlife.
Commerce in wildlife parts and bushmeat developed first to exploit displaced animals. As demand grew, a business niche opened for farming species such as tigers - but raising animals in captivity remains far more costly than poaching them. Tiger breeders, however, can offset the expense of raising tigers by exhibiting them.
Killing tigers need not become a public issue if the breeder/exhibitor keeps them in conditions conducive to significant numbers dying prematurely from disease, malnutrition, and fights among tigers who are haphazardly group-housed. Such circumstances are often exposed-to little avail-by both mainstream Chinese and foreign news media.
And hardly anyone notices the turnover of tiger cubs at many zoos, where some are almost constantly on display at photo concessions, drugged and accessible to cuddling.
"The sad truth is that the tigers are far more valuable dead than alive," observed Richard Jones in a February 2010 expose of conditions at the Xiongsen Wildlife Park.
"With pelts selling for $20,000 and a single paw worth as much as $1,000, the value of a dead tiger has never been higher," agreed Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times. "If there is any mystery about what happens to the big cats at Xiongsen," acobs added, "it is partly explained in the gift shop," where tiger bone wine is sold.
Similar scenes are often reported from the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, along with feeding cattle and poultry to tigers alive, to thrill paying visitors. Several other such facilities are known to exist. Live feeding is illegal at Chinese zoos that are regulated as zoos, but the tiger farms, though open to the public, are regulated by a different agency.
Visitors are told that the live feeding is preparing tigers to be returned to the wild. But where adequate wild tiger habitat remains in China to permit any future releases is a question unanswered by maps and satellite photos. The only captive-bred tigers ever returned to the wild were released by Billy Arjan Singh at the future site of Dudwa National Park, India, more than 30 years ago.
Singh, 92, died on January 1, 2010, at his Tiger Haven private refuge, 250 kilometers from Lucknow. He did not outlive the wild tiger population he tried to restore, but may not have fallen far short. 
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