Please save the tigers

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Chatha, Nov 17, 2006.

  1. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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  3. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Agreed, but this thread isn't about farming, its about private owners who keep them as pets. Sometimes these people don't know what they are doing, and there are many Tigers that have died in their hands. Tigers are not PET animals, they need exercise and some freedom to survive properly. Like the black Guy in New York who had a pet Tiger in his apartment, he probably wasn't going to breed them because he barely had enough space for his one Tiger. He is not the only one, they are everywhere around the world. These are the real problem.

    How can we be part of the problem when we are creating Tiger awareness. Private farming is not necessarily a bad idea, that is when its properly done, monitored, regulated, and guilded by experts. Having a sanctuary of Tigers in a small suburban backyard is not exactly proper Tiger farming, tens of hundreds of Tigers die every year from sanctuary homes. This is not exactly a way to care for a criticaly endangered species. Tiger farming is fine, but more and more people are getting into the act of Tigers for pets, and more people don't have an idea of what they are doing; the risks and possibilities cannot be omitted. Some enviroments aren't even substantial enough for Dogs, much less Tigers. These are the problems
     
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  5. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Actually, according to many trials, captive bred animals have always had it difficult to adapt to the wild, not all but very many. Tigers are part of the animals that find it difficult to adapt to the wild. Maybe this might work, I don't really know.The only known solution is to create artifical reserves. There is a lot of talk about private farming, I don't know why that has become so important all of a sudden because the NGO's and Government can farm these animals just as well or even better. Private farms in Asia are part of the Asia Tiger trafficking problems. With NGO's you at least have a centralized system, you can at least account for all losses, ailments, and distribution accross regions. A lot of people thought private farming would be sufficient enough to cater for the Trafficking of Tigers but they were wrong. --Tigers in Private farms breed the same way and time as Tigers in Reserves. Before long, they run out of Tigers and poach for new ones.
    -Tigers in private owners are exorbitantly expensive to raise and the owners pass the price on to the buyers, which further fosters the buyers to poach directly in the wild. This was the situation in Russia.
    - Tigers bred in captive have found it difficult to adapt to the wild. FACT. One of the real reason is that Tigers are solitary by nature and usually command a huge portion of land to themselves. Caged Tigers are used to contact and do not mind company, they are more social, in the wild caged Tigers will venture into another Tiger's territory, which will prompt a fierce territorial battle and eventually lead to one or the other being killed. Sibling Tigers have been known to kill off their own parents due to territory infrigement, Cubs are not an exception also.

    I heard about that. Thats beautiful, good for them, but not all animals are the same.

    Metakron has a point but Metakron doesn't know too much about the Tigers. Governments conduct private captive farming just as well as Private owners. What is the difference? All I am saying is that private farming license shouldn't be handed to just anybody anymore. I mean, if there are no more of these creatures in reserves but in private captive, it would be a matter of time when private poachers pounce on these private farmers. Lets assume all Tigers were no more in the wild reserves, all Tigers in private captive will eventually be re-released in the wild, then poaching of these animals will continue and we are BACK where we started. So, because of this there is a need for a centralized care-taker system for these animals, which only large parties like the government can regulate.

    I support that notion. But Private parties aren't exactly helping either. No Government organization will sell their Tiger to the highest bidder, Governments can provide better facilities NOT cages. Even the Dog, with all the years of domestication, is still always happiest when you decide to take him out for a walk. How would you feel if you were locked up in a building 20 hrs a day, 365 days a year?
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2006
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  7. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Metakron,
    You mentioned you have seen prices for animals at 300k USD, that was even too much, the person that paid that much for that animal is an idiot because you can find Tigers for a lot less. For 30k you can buy a healthy male Tiger, for 50k you can buy a female, and 100k will buy you a healthy family. For 300k you can buy a generation. Of cause it all depends on the aboundance of Tigers, in 1993 you could buy a male for 10k. These are the things Government organizations have a better leverage against. Again, the real problem is not farming, but keeping them as pets or medicine. We have to establish a respect for Tigers for us to be able to protect them.
     
  8. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Actually you are right, but endengered species are illegal, unless you have enough money to grease the officials. You also have to be financially capable to provide proper care for certain animals, the ASPCA will fine you and even put you in jail for violating these rules. Not just the ASPCA, there are countless of organizations out there that can take you to court if they find you violate any rules. The average cost of owning a big cat will probably cost you 30-50k a year.

    ---Herald,
    http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/03/asia/AS_GEN_India_China_Protecting_Tigers.php
     
  9. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    One trouble with the organizations that you listen to, Chatha, is that they have doctrine but they don't seem to know tigers except from books, and they've cherry-picked the books. They demonize private owners. The trouble with that is that they don't know what kind of experiences private owners have. Also, what is with asking for the government to control everything? That's simply expressing distrust and contempt, and attempting to use authority to bully anyone who doesn't agree with them.

    Looking at "big cats" and "infant mortality" on Google, it seems that more than half of all big cats die before the age of one year in the wild. Farmers and other private owners can actually ease this mortality rate somewhat. Even somewhat unknowledgable and careless owners can probably beat nature because they will provide more food, shelter, and protection from predators and accidents. Organizations like IFAW routinely use the bad experiences to demonize all private owners. That alone should tell you two things, that they know diddly about the care of animals and that they are mean-spirited and manipulative.

    If I need a tiger in America, there are still people I can get healthy tigers from for free. That's how some of the infamous hoarders are getting theirs, the ones who pretend to be the top of the line sanctuaries and who are nasty to everyone else who owns big cats. A lot of them are simply killed, after IFAW and others get laws passed, and their parts are simply destroyed one way or the other. The actual market price for a tiger in America that can be made into traditional medicines is the cost of transportation and butchering. There is little risk in many states that those who do this will be caught.

    I don't think that keeping them as pets or medicine is a "real problem." It takes a bit of courage to say that because there are all these organizations who would shut me up, maybe by extreme measures. You have a problem with it, and your solution includes forbidding every private person from owning them, even though the vast majority of them want those tigers in order to preserve them. IFAW and others always tell you to see the worst side of ownership and won't let you talk about the positive side. The positive side is that we have a lot of living tigers.

    You can go on about the genetic defects caused by unscrupulous breeders, but we have "conservationists" who get all bent out of shape when anyone proposes adding fresh genes to limited gene pools like those of the Florida black panther and the different sets of cats allowed into the species survival programs. The results of this are inbreeding and genetic defects because all such populations are below the critical numbers for viable gene pools. The vast majority of the genetic resources for big cats are in private hands right now. This once again proves the success of private ownership, and the demonization by animal rights activists just shows those activists to be fools.

    The Florida black panther could be brought back to viability by the occasional introduction of more common black panthers that aren't endangered. They would refresh the gene pools. It would be stupid to be stuck on the color black, too. It would be the same mistake that you would accuse private owners of making. Purebreeding encourages inbreeding. Getting away from ideas of genetic purity by subspecies ensures that each group of animals will have more healthy descendants.

    Actually, I think that licenses should be handed out freely. Here's why. Regulation creep has made the common USDA license meaningless because it gives owners no protection, it makes them liable for crippling fines that they wouldn't be if unlicensed and in an unlicensed state, and it's the kind of requirement that they try to get the states to force on all but the select few. What if they did this to owners of cattle and sheep? Ranchers lose a lot of animals to infant mortality, drought, and heat and cold. Those animals are also dangerous. The same excuses exist to lock most ranchers out of the business.

    Why do you think that government regulations are going to help anything? Government regulations have not improved the care of animals. The building of a community of owners who share information has. Government regulation does not sit up with them all night and it does not run them to the vet when they need help.

    I see private ownership as a solution, not a problem, and if you really care about the animals, you will listen to private owners instead of helping to demonize them. You may be sure that a lot of them are decent, and you may pay lip service to that fact, but as long as you continue to say that private ownership is a problem, you haven't learned anything about it or taken to heart what you have learned.
     
  10. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    Endangered species can be owned with licensing. Also, laws restricting the breeding of endangered animals are among the stupidest ever passed. A species is endangered and its chances are improved by outlawing the breeding of the species? No, it's not. I'm surprised how many people are stupid enough to fall for the idea that it "creates a market." That idea is for bamboozling people, not for telling the truth. The truth is that almost any species if bred by private owners will soon exist in large enough numbers to no longer be endangered. What they did to the ocelot was obscene. There were thousands of them in captivity. They were legal to own as a pet. Then a law was passed against breeding the ones that people legally owned as pets. Don't wave that away or shake your head funny at me, either. The fact is that endangered species legislation has seriously endangered the ocelots. So what if they can't be re-introduced into the wild? Humans live where they used to live. Let humans take care of them.

    I hope that people get their heads on straight and choke the life out of the Save the Tigers Fund, IFAW, PETA, and all the other dull crayons in this box. This thing from the Save the Tigers Fund is the whiniest piece of crap to come down the pike lately. China is saving the tiger and so are private owners in America. Don't like the way they do it? That's reality, mister. That is freaking reality and that is dealing with it the best that we know how, and since those organizations can't deal with it, wind up seeing them as competition and doing what it takes to destroy these efforts, and generally accomplish the exact opposite of what they pretend they want to do, they can go bye-bye. Humans have had the nerve to simply take over the land that once belonged to other animals. The set-asides don't work. We can muster up the moral courage to throw off the oppression of the animal rights groups and tend to our business the way that nature intended, and this includes taking care of our brothers and sisters who live on the planet that we live on, without being interfered with by people who obviously don't have sufficient brain cells to understand simple realities.
     
  11. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    You see, what I learned about these animal rights organizations is that they are terribly negative and destructive while providing little if any real help to the animals. I'm willing to say that overall they are worse than useless. Almost every animal rights/animal welfare/animal conservation organization either wants breeding to be forbidden or to be so burdened with regulation that complying with the regulations makes breeding prohibitively expensive. That alone tells me that it is worse than useless.

    Then when someone is actually helping the animals, those activist organizations are all over them like leeches. They use these promises of more regulation to gain donations, they use the owners very cynically for the same purpose and don't even give them a cut, and when anyone comes up with anything to actually help the animals, in a whiny nasty voice the activists say "But it's wrong! Shut it down!" These activists most of them have never bottle-fed a baby big cat, have never mucked out a pen, have never worked with anything more than a poodle (properly sterilized of course) and they know nothing about whether such things will work or not. They make dire predictions and lambast others for making dire predictions about what they do. Of course they don't want to give any program a fair chance. If it works they lose their millions a year in donations that they think belongs to them by right.

    It is this kind of animal conservation effort that has endangered a lot of species and made them go extinct.
     
  12. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    The government is responsible for natural game and wild life, the government is the people, the government has better methods of investigation and records, and government policies are the general concensus of THE people. The government is still the best bet, you can underestimate them now but if it wasn't for governments and NGO's Tigers would have probably been extinct all together. Thats reality. Another reason is that nobody trusts anybody in this game, so its why we have governments in the first place.

    I know, I thought we've been down this road before. Governments and NGO's provide better artificial enviroments, better farms, and better all round regulation.

    I am sure you are right

    listen there is a reality to things. YOU CAN'T OWN AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, wait till its off the CATT list and you can buy and keep all the pets you want. Its not fair for some guy to buy very rare animals as pets, knowing fully well that these communual property that makes everyone happy. All we are saying is... wait till they eventually flurish again...if there were no Tigers where the fuck are you going to buy Tigers? Thats why they are illegal and protected; for you, me, and our children.

    Weell..we'll see how successful they are, so far they haven't done squart for the Tigers over 100 years. I wonder just how much time they need. And yes, In-breeding is a by-product of private ownership.

    There are ways you can avoid all this issues alltogether, just keep them in large sanctuaries big enough to accomodate them. Asian private farms have been practicing Tiger farming for years, and are probably better at it. But you see, sometimes Tigers may develope ailments and diseases, diseases only the CDC, center for disease control can help with. You can never completely take out the governent and NGO's from this issue. By the way there are still enough Tigers in the world for us to be worring about issues such as this. In any case if this is a problem for the government its an even bigger problem for a private owner.

    What are you talking about?

    (LOL) You are thinking like a kid. How old are you? Really?

    WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND GOVERNMENT RESERVES EVERYWHERE? IS THERE SOMETHING THAT'S SO SPECIAL THAT...WE..ARE..MISSING? If you think the government is useless then lets give up the police, see how safe you would be then
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2006
  13. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Why is that the truth? huh? Why is it that government officials can't do what other humans can do? Why? The people in government, where do they come from? From the sky?

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  14. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    Chatha, why is it that you think that other humans can't do what governments can?

    Get rid of the CATT list, I say.
     
  15. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    It's the truth because private owners breed animals in far larger quantities at far lower cost.
     
  16. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Okay, lets say we take all the Tigers in the wild reserve, and we give them all to the private owners. Don't you think we would be back at square one? We still face the aspects of in-breeding, sale to pet owners, and medicine men, e.t.c. Nothing is going to change. You still need some form of enforcement... how do you intend to create it? And if you do, how is it going to be different from the government's?
     
  17. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Far larger quantities? Where are they going...to get the money and donation from? Isn't that talking about an NGO?

    Far fewer cost? I see, so they starve the animals, have no security measures, and neglect their vet bills...right?

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  18. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Here is what you are saying. We should at all cost avoid NGO's, we should at all cost avoid Government organizations, and put the life of Tigers on the hands of unknown individuals.....well well ...aren't you the smart one!
     
  19. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    The program that you support actively destroys animals that are already in private hands. You need to face this reality.

    I'm not very worried about enforcement beyond making sure that they have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to medical care, the basics.

    The medicine men, by their nature, can be reasoned with. They would far rather have government sanctioned supplies anyway and not have to fear arrest.

    I refuse to allow the use of the fact of inbreeding or the fact of medicine men to demonize all private owners. The potential is always there, but that doesn't make it wrong to breed them, especially when the medicine men would prefer to get their supplies legally and inbreeding is not an immediate disaster. Your people want any taint to be removed, and you attack the people that you can reach, the same people that are also most successful at producing healthy tigers. You totally lack and even totally oppose successful efforts to increase the number of threatened species, so you also totally lack a program that can succeed. You only have programs in the negative sense, in that you would destroy anything that you don't like but you can't build anything and you will stop others from building anything.

    What I propose is to leave most of the tigers in the wild reserve (and other big cats) but rescue orphans when possible. We don't actually need even one tiger from the reserves. The viable breeding population already exists. It's anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 tigers in the U.S. That's enough to prevent inbreeding. It's enough to breed for appearance if you're worried about that. A "subspecies" is like a Chihuaha or a Great Dane. Golden Tabbies, thought to be extinct, were recently born to another subspecies, demonstrating that they really are the same species, a fact that is well known already to biologists. Anyway, we have the fact of a successful breeding program, all privately funded, that is keeping a species viable. Don't worry about anything except the actual numbers of living animals if you are serious about preserving the species. You're overworking the problems and not paying enough attention to the successes.

    As a matter of conscience I have to support private ownership as the only proven successful method for protecting threatened and endangered species.
     
  20. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    Yes I am. These "unknown individuals" do a better job than the governmental and non-govermental organizations and a lot of them don't waste their time and energy screwing others out of what they have.
     
  21. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Alright if NGO's and Governments are screwing others out of what they have, what makes you think private parties aren't screwing others out of what they have. Evidence is that private parties in Asia are responsible for many of the Tiger's demise. The fact is that whatever you say about Governments and NGOs you have to also apply to private parties. There is a lot more transparency with Government and NGO's, at least if something happens you have a collection of people to hold responsible. If they give away all cats to private parties, it won't be long before nobody knows what's actually going on, and there would still be complains about the animals depletion. Private parties have to face the same thing NGO's and Governments have to, poaching, theft, and diseases. Smugglers and poachers will only adapt to the new situaton. Nothing will change. We will be back where we started and even worse. Governments and NGO's still have better protection facilities. Even if the bet is to give away the Tigers to private parties, the government will never do that. They would never do that because they don't know the financial situation, the commitment situation, the responsibilities of the private party, plus who knows what could happen to them into the future. Idealy the best people for teh Job are NGO's since governments have a lot of things to cater for, but there are whole departments of the governments that take this as their sole responsibility and are well funded, well funded enough to avoid bribes and corruption...at least that is the idea. Giving away the animals to private parties with no documentation or monitoring is not a good idea. Private farming has been tried and tried before, it didn't work, no better than what the government is doing. If I were a poacher or smuggler I would also hunt in facilities with relatively lesser security, facilities where a missing Tiger won't make too much ruffles in the international community. In fact private farming is one of the biggest reasons why the Tiger numbers are down.
     
  22. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    There are a lot of tigers in private hands right now. The only thing that depletes them is when organizations like IFAW manage to convince a state to make it illegal to keep them. Private farming does work to increase their numbers. You only say that it doesn't work because it doesn't work the way that you want it to. Too bad, that's the real world for you.

    No, private farming is most likely why there still are tigers in the wild. You use a distorted view of the idea of the "market" for tiger parts. Already the supply of carcasses is greater than the number that can be supplied even by taking every tiger that still lives in the wild. The article that you pointed to says that they are warehousing carcasses and waiting for them to become legal. When they do become legal the number of carcasses in warehouses will exceed the number of carcasses still on the hoof in the wild.

    The only way that I can characterize you is as someone who fights to prevent the tiger problem from being solved. It's a hell of a lot easier to simply create a large population from which demand can be supplied by the number of tigers who die natural deaths, in quantities much greater than can be harvested from the wild, than it is to stop China from its traditional medicine practices.

    It's your tangle. I'm glad that more and more people are ignoring people like you, Chatha. There will be a resurgence in the popularity of private ownership and you will be locked out of this controversy. The farmers will win against you.

    You see, we can't win this by making it a crime and fighting crime. We can win this by creating a legal supply. I'm not going to leave it up to you, either.
     
  23. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    http://www.worldwildlife.org/tigers/population.cfm

    There are only 7,000 Tigers left in the wild, so I doubt you are right here. Anyway I think we are both after the same thing. My recommendation is to release the Tigers into the American wild preserves, American authorities have better resources to protect them. I know you are smarter than a lot of your posts, so any ideas will be okay.
     

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