The largest tiger farms outside Asia are operating freely in South Africa, facilitating the illegal smuggling of tiger body parts, according to a report by an animal welfare charity.
Research by Four Paws, which is campaigning to shut down South Africa’s big cat industry, found 103 places in the country where tigers were kept in captivity in 2023 or 2024 or had been kept during the previous three years.
Several facilities were breeding tigers to sell their body parts to China or Vietnam for use in traditional medicine, the report said, identifying three networks it said were known or suspected to be involved.
Members of one network of “interlinked criminal syndicates” posted photos on social media advertising “tiger products”, which the report said were suspected to be tiger bone glue.
In another photo that the report included in anonymised form, network members claimed they were cooking tigers somewhere in South Africa.
Tigers are classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which estimated in 2021 that about 5,574 were left in the wild, scattered across 13 Asian countries.
That was a 40% increase in the population since 2021 but it still represents a huge drop from 100,000 about a century ago.
The commercial trade in live tigers and their body parts has been banned globally since 1975, under the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora (Cites). However, it “remains one of the greatest threats to wild tiger populations”, according to the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF).
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.
However, exporting lion bones has been banned since 2019. The environment minister, Dion George, said he had “taken a clear and decisive stance against captive lion breeding”, in a speech in October marking 100 days in office.
The 2024 government report noted that regulations were weaker for tigers, because they were not native to South Africa, making it a “more attractive option” for big cat breeders.
