HARVEST TIME AT THE TIGER FARM

Say you live in China and you want to be a farmer. Okay, the odds are if you live in China you already are a farmer. But as a farmer, you've got to decide what to grow. With 1.3 billion mouths to feed in your nation, there's no shortage of demand for your product, whatever is is you decide to raise. But in China, you might want to become a tiger farmer. What? Yes, a tiger farmer, raising real live tigers. You'd think there are safer commodities to raise than tigers, no? No farmer ever got mauled or eaten alive by sorghum or alfalfa.

Here's the deal: in China, a nation claiming to be a modern high tech society, there is still a huge demand for tiger parts as medicine and aphrodisiacs. Tiger farmers can profit from every part of the tiger, from his beautiful hide to his testicles and his crushed, dried bones as a remedy for rheumatoid arthritis. Tiger meat is also sold for an exotic meal, the vague notion being that one defeats the tiger by ingesting his spirit. So much for any claim to widespread modern enlightenment.

These cave man notions are so prevalent that wild tigers have been eliminated almost completely from China, with less than 50 still at large. Couple that with the fact that Chairman Mao, the founder of modern China, was not content to have murdered tens of millions of his countrymen and also declared tigers "enemies of the people." And when The Great Helmsman declared anybody an enemy of the people his eager minions got busy, industriously slaughtering the objects of his homicidal whims. Wild tigers are scarcer than opposition political parties in China today.

Enter the tiger farmer, breeding and feeding captive tigers to keep up with the great demand for voodoo tiger remedies. They also claim that tiger farming eases the menace of poaching that threatens wild tigers in every nation where they still roam free. A huge black market exists for tiger parts since many of the practitioners of tiger medicine insist that wild tigers make for a more potent remedy. Tiger farming only serves to perpetuate the use of the quack placebos made from these animals, so tigers everywhere are in peril.

Since the 1980's, as the Chinese economy went into overdrive to become what it is today, the Western world's back office and manufacturing branch, the demand for tiger parts has actually increased dramatically. That would be like Druid medicine having a renaissance in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. But critics of tiger farming and Chinese medicine are told that their calls to end these practices are insensitive insults to Chinese culture. The Chinese have apparently learned a lot from the Arab world, who often pull out the "cultural differences" card to excuse bad behavior, like keeping their women under house arrest and having a penal code that makes the Spanish Inquisition seem enlightened by comparison.

The Chinese government uses the cultural differences card to explain away everything from child labor to political tyranny, Mao's legacy of genocide, stealing patents and copyrights, the jailing and torture of political dissenters, the military atrocities in Tibet, widespread starvation in their "workers paradise" and now the annihilation of the tiger. Let's hope that harvest time at the tiger farm is every bit as problematic as one would think it would be. Those majestic and dangerous cats are not exactly going to act like lambs when it comes to being led to the slaughter. Maybe after a couple of these "harvests," raising sorghum will start to look better and better.