According to a charity, South African tiger farms are unlawfully transporting body parts

According to a report by an animal rights NGO, South Africa is home to the biggest tiger farms outside of Asia, which allows the illegal importation of tiger body parts. According to research conducted by Four Paws, a group that is working to end the big cat trade in South Africa, there were 103 locations nationwide where tigers were either held in captivity in 2023 or 2024 or had been kept for the preceding three years. The research identified three networks it stated were known or believed to be involved in the breeding of tigers for the sale of their body parts to China or Vietnam for use in traditional medicine.

According to the report, members of a network of “interlinked criminal syndicates” shared images of “tiger products” on social media, which were allegedly tiger bone glue. Members of the network claimed to be frying tigers someplace in South Africa in another anonymized photo that was included in the report.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which listed tigers as endangered, there were around 5,574 tigers remaining in the wild in 2021, dispersed over 13 Asian nations. Even if the population has increased by 40% since 2021, it is still far less than the 100,000 people who lived there a century ago. According to the convention on international commerce in endangered species of wild fauna and flora (Cites), the commercial trade in live tigers and their body parts has been prohibited worldwide since 1975. Nonetheless, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) states that it “remains one of the greatest threats to wild tiger populations.”

There were 626 tigers in captivity in South Africa, according to a government report in February 2024. But the study did not get data from two South African provinces: KwaZulu-Natal, the country’s second most populous province, and Mpumalanga. Lion bones were also being exported illegally from South Africa to be sold in Asia as tiger bones, the Four Paws report said. South Africa allows commercial breeding of lions, including for trophy hunting, and they can be sold abroad alive or as carcasses.

But since 2019, exporting lion bones has been prohibited. In an October speech commemorating his 100 days in office, Environment Minister Dion George declared that he had “taken a clear and decisive stance against captive lion breeding.” Because they were not indigenous to South Africa, tigers were subject to laxer rules, according to the 2024 government assessment, which made them a “more attractive option” for large cat breeders.