CHANGE WILDLIFE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

Tiger bone has been used as a treatment for rheumatism and related ailments for thousands of years in traditional Asian medicine. In the early 1990s, it became evident that medicinal trade in Tiger bone threatened to drive the already endangered Tiger Panthera tigris to extinction in the wild. The importance of this threat was documented in the 1994 TRAFFIC report, Killed For A Cure: A Review of the Worldwide Trade in Tiger Bone (Mills and Jackson, 1994). Since the report’s publication, there has been increased national and international investment in Tiger conservation and trade control and promotion of substitutes for Tiger bone. But what progress there has been has brought new challenges and some old problems remain to be tackled. This report relies primarily upon market surveys, rather than on official trade statistics, which were the primary source for Killed For A Cure, since, with few exceptions, Tiger trade is now illegal. The report compares markets for Tigers and their parts and products in the late 1990s to the early 1990s, to examine the extent to which trade continues to threaten the Tiger going into the new millennium.