India, Feb. 25 -- Tigers in parts of east and south-east Asia can come in bottled form, sold openly in industrial breeding centres as tiger bone wine, a concoction that is claimed to treat arthritis
Tigers could once be found across much of Asia, from eastern Turkey to Siberia and Indonesia. Today, they are reduced to living in just 6% of their former range. In many of these areas tigers are no longer even valued as free-ranging wild animals, but merely as products for financial profit, worth more dead than alive.
I have spent more than a decade visiting "tiger farms" in four countries in east and south-east Asia, and am currently working on a book about the different ways in which tigers are valued, both in the wild and in captivity. I f...