Another point of note is that most of these animals most likely came from zoo or circus over-production. I worked in the zoo/aquarium biz (fish and herps, but saw it all. My wife was a pachyderm keeper).
Mmmh... That's why she married you ??? :evil:
Big cats and hoof stock breed like crazy in captivity, and big cats in particular are very expensive to support. They are generally antisocial, and eat nothing but meat. Zoo's generally run on shoe string budgets, so uneasy alliances with private distributors just kind of happen to help pay the bills. I got out of the biz about 15+ years ago, but even at that time it was a major point of contention that most zoo production was heading into private collection since there was nowhere else to go with it. Spay/Neuter or other forms of birth control was being practiced by the more responsible zoos, but a lot of stuff would end up at shooting ranches in Texas.
In France I worked at the customs for many years, and I happened to have been a friend of Alain Bonneau, both a veterinary and the director of the CITES office in France for a long time. He reported exactly the same to me, the big cat styles breed like normal street cat, and at a point, no one knows what to do with them ( at that time it was illegal to neuter them, as they were App I CITES, and under the old EU regulations of those days, it was not possible to harm anything from the App I... this included neutering...). They end up with many euthanasia, selling surplus to private zoos ( and in France we have a few privately owned zoos that were first class, like Thoiry...).
People do not realize how common it is to get tiger ( even white tiger, giant tiger, Siberian Tiger, etc...) cubs in zoos, there are simply too many. And many zoos, when the animals are in heat, let them breed to be peaceful or that's hell in the zoo... giving the next generation... The same happens with some of the parrots too ( though it is easier to control), and some reptiles.
Given that they are almost extinct in the wild, should there be more effort for zoos to get these excess tigers released in their natural environment rather than give them cowboy private citizens? There is a lot of collabaration between various zoos around the world to maintain the genetic diversity of tigers but I now wonder what is the point if they are just selling their excess stock to the private sector as they do not know what to do with them. Surely the end goal is to get viable populations back in the wild.
David
No, because the source of most of the parental stock from most zoos, including public ones, is very, very 'bleak'. We followed up the path of a couple of things ( Komodo varan, some giant turtles, and even some lions) in France. We found an honorable zoo was importing/getting them from a quite honorable source. Then, following the path, like for many plants in botanical gardens, we ended up in the poacher/smuggler world being the source. How you want to trust them for the real source of those animals? Now we have DNA testing, but even so, it would be tremendous task to type all the various types, races and populations, and reintroduce those.
I was very interested in Komodo varans in those days, because the two legal sellers were quite strange. Well, they got them from a poacher group in Indonesia for quite a lot of them ( some came from San Diego Zoo breeding program though, but really few, and the papers were split, one imported from SD zoo, 4-5 resold...). I know some of those sellers from this ring. The poachers knew that it is way easier to get Komodo varan from the remote colonies of Flores, there are some in Ambon as well. So they are disjunct populations. If you reintroduce captive bred Komodo one day, they will be hybrid of those populations, for sure. That would be the same problem as the Galapagos turtles varieties...
The other problem we had too at that time were diseases, including viruses, that had attacked those animals in captivity, sometimes the cubs. Many of those disease (including Borrelia) were not deadly immediately, but there. How could anyone guarantee that, let's say, tigers cubs fed by a mother who ate a pig contaminated with a pig virus, are not going to carry on the virus, then back to the wild? There are many major concerns against reintroduction in the wild ( especially big cats, they have been found to be sensitive to many, if not nearly all, the domestic cat disease, including FIV, etc...).
About the tranquilizer darts, they are exceedingly difficult to use, and some species can have an highly erratic behavior. The customs in France and Czech republic got several major issues with tranquilizer that did make the animals become raving mad.
For humans too, the french Police ordered some containers of Capstun, a kind of tear spray that supposedly stops the people. Well, they made trials, and some people were immobilized. Some could use it as a deo spray. And some became out of control, with an unimaginable strenght and craziness. Those were usually people suffering from schizophrenia, some people who had strokes, and some people from specific populations. All the subjects from some former USSR countries, could not care less, we tried, and genetically they were definitely nearly totally insensitive.
