Laos still winks at tiger farms

LIU CHUNG shakes her head: there are no more tiger zoos here, she insists. This is strange. The area around the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a swathe of north-western Laos where Ms Liu, a taxi driver, plies her trade, is famous for its tigers. Not wild ones, which have nearly all been killed in Laos, but captive animals, illegally trafficked and bred for their parts, which sell for thousands of dollars. Your correspondent points on her map to a place near the SEZ where a tiger farm is rumoured to operate. Now Ms Liu remembers. She starts up the engine. 

A century ago, around 100,000 tigers roamed the world’s jungles. Because of habitat loss and poaching, there are fewer than 4,000 wild ones today. More than twice as many are being held in at least 200 farms across East and South-East Asia, says Leigh Henry of the World Wildlife Fund. These range from small backyard operations to enclosures breeding hundreds in “battery-farm style”, says the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO focusing on wildlife crime.

Breeding tigers and trading them and their parts is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but this treaty is widely flouted in Asia because of poor law-enforcement and high demand for tigers. Belief in their medicinal properties has deep...