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Would you like to adopt a tiger?
photo by chris jd (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
If you live in Indonesia and have $100,000 to spare, you soon may be able to. The Indonesian government is contemplating a tiger adoption initiative in an attempt to curb the illegal poaching of the endangered big cats.
These aren’t the typical kind of wildlife conservation ‘adoptions’ like the WWF’s Adopt a Tiger program, where a modest donation will get you a photo of a tiger and a plush doll. Ordinary Indonesian citizens would actually be able to keep a pair of adult Sumatran tigers in their own back yards for a deposit of $100 grand. According to CNN, the tigers will remain the property of the Indonesian state and be strictly monitored.
“We hope that this program will eradicate poaching because in Indonesia or abroad a lot of people want to have tigers as pets. But because it is illegal they go and buy the dead tigers.”
–Darori, Indonesian Director General of Forest Protection and Conservation (from CNN)
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But according to a press release from the WWF, there are only 3,200 wild tigers left in Asia. For comparison, there may be even more than 3,000 pet tigers in the U.S. state of Texas alone. That sounds crazy too. Should the Indonesian government go ahead with this initiative, I foresee complications including sick and mistreated tigers. After all, tiger’s are not housecats and require special care.
The Sumatran tiger’s habitat is disappearing due to deforestation for wood, paper and palm oil. Tigers are also being poached for their body parts, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Apparently desperate times call for desperate measures, but a better course of action might be to protect the tigers dwindling jungle habitats and increase other, more realistic, efforts to stop poaching.
Check out this video report from CNN Eco Solutions:
CNN – ‘Indonesia considers adopt-a-tiger scheme’
In related news, the BBC reports that authorities have found four tigers in a house in the suburbs of the Indonesian capital Jakarta. It is not know whether the tigers are Sumatran.
by Graham Land
Additional resources:
Tags: adopt, CNN, government, Indonesia, Indonesian, initiative, Nature, pet, poaching, Sumatran, tiger, WWF
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