The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside. Russian Proverb

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Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. NIKOLAI GOGOL, Dead Souls

Captivity is a one-way trip. There is a poignant irony in this because, at one time or another, all of us have been in the tiger’s situation. The majority of us live how and where we do because, at some point in the recent past, we were forced out of our former habitats and ways of living by more aggressive, if not better adapted, humans. Worth asking here is: Where does this trend ultimately lead? Is there a better way to honor the fact that we survived?

But as easy and tempting as it is to vilify the trade in tiger-based products, it has a long and honored history in Asia. As the Plains Indians were reputed to have used every part of the buffalo, so, in Asia, is there a use for every part of the tiger. Even the scat was used to treat gastric ailments, and Korean mandarins especially prized robes made with the skins of unborn cubs. This may seem repugnant, but in every culture, the wealthy and, increasingly, the middle class have sought products that are exotic, precious, and rare, often at great cost to the environment. Alligator handbags, tropical woods, waterfront property, caviar, and diamonds are just a few examples of this. In terms of its impact on nature—and on us—our appetite for oil is infinitely more damaging than our appetite for tigers.

To be fair, ten thousand years is an astonishingly short time for a species to fundamentally remake its relationship to the systems that keep it alive. But humans are astonishing, and that is precisely what we have done: by mass-producing food, energy, material goods, and ourselves, we have attempted to secede from, and override, the natural order.* Now with the true costs of this experiment becoming painfully apparent, we must remake this relationship yet again.

“For tigers to exist, we have to want them to exist.”