Is tiger farming illegal? If some tigers were bred on farms, they could be used to make Chinese aphrodisiacs.

Question

Tigers are being poached in India and other places were they are protected because their body parts are worth a lot on the black market. Tiger testicles and penises are used to make aphrodisiacs in Chinese medicine. The teeth and skins are made into decorative stuff, like amulets or rugs or whatever. Whatever that stuff is, people are willing to pay lots of money for it, and not just in China. Why not just raise tigers on a farm just for these people that insist on buying stuff made out of tigers? I despise the whole idea of making endangered animals into baloney drugs and tacky nicknacks, but I'm trying to be culturally sensitive, instead of a rude, patronizing American. Tiger farming would save the wild, protected tigers, because the market would be flooded with the farmed tiger parts, and the poachers would have no incentive to kill wild tigers. I could be forgetting that some people only want parts of wild tigers, because they are more "magic", but how they know the differenc

Answer 1

Zoos are tiger farms, when you get right down to it.  For the more common tigers, captive breeding works pretty well.  I read somewhere (perhaps an article in the Washington Post about the National Zoo?) that among zoo managers, tiger cubs are abundant and NOT in demand,  Tigers eat a lot of expensive meat over their lifetimes, so tiger cubs were described as "a glut on the market".  

It's hard to imagine western zoos supplying tiger parts to Asian medicine, but if you're not interested in the most exotic and rarest of tigers, tiger farming should be possible.