To Save the Big Cats, Let People Kill Them

The repeal of Prohibition did not utterly eradicate the production of moonshine, in part because repeal was only partial itself. But Prohibition's repeal did knock the legs out from under the organized crime that had flourished by selling contraband booze.

Some of that contraband was made in fugitive stills, and some was produced by the Canadian and Mexican breweries and distilleries that also flourished during Prohibition. All of it was costly. Prohibition hiked the price of beer 700 percent; brandy, 433 percent; and liquor, 270 percent. (The variable increases reflect the bootleggers' shift to more concentrated and therefore more easily transported spirits.)

But once inexpensive, legal alcoholic beverages became plentiful again, there was little point in buying bathtub gin from criminals at artificially inflated prices. So with the collapse in demand for illegal booze, the illegal suppliers collapsed also.

The history of Prohibition and repeal is important because of one of its modern-day analogues: the restrictions on the use of endangered animals, such as the trade in body parts. Much of that trade has been banned for decades. Yet despite the bans and the ongoing attempts to enforce them, many of the species are worse off now than they ever have been.

Consider lions and tigers. In an alarming Op/Ed for The Washington Post, renowned filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert, explorers-in-residence at National Geographic, note that lions -- which numbered half a million half a century ago -- now total fewer than 25,000. Tigers face an even more precarious future: Only a few thousand still remain, and most of them live in captivity.

One of the problems confronting lions, say the Jouberts, is that because tigers are so scarce, poachers are substituting lion bones for the tiger bones used in Chinese folk-medicine cures. Because of the decline in lion numbers, CITES -- the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species -- is considering whether to list lions as an endangered species worthy of greater protection.

But it seems unlikely further restrictions will do for lions what they have failed to do for tigers for the past three decades. So perhaps another approach is called for: creating economic incentives for the propagation, rather than the decimation, of these animals. For instance, legalize the market in tiger bones and let ranchers raise tigers for slaughter. According to Baron Mitra of India's Liberty Institute, who favors such an approach, "a single farmed specimen might fetch as much as $40,000; the retail value of all the tiger products [such as claws and pelts] might be three to five times that amount."

Raising the big cats for sport hunting also offers a huge financial reward. Three years ago The Independent in Britain reported that trophy hunters were willing to pay close to $1 million to shoot and stuff commercially bred exotic animals, including lions, leopards, and elephants. (The popularity of "canned hunts" led to a recent crackdown in South Africa, which now requires that an animal raised in captivity be allowed to roam freely for two years before it can be hunted.)

Animal-welfare groups oppose such an approach, for two principal reasons. One is philosophical. As a representative of the International Fund for Animal Welfare puts it, "conservationists refuse to accept that these wild and regal creatures, which have inspired the novels of Rudyard Kipling and the poetry of William Blake, can only be valued through an economic prism."

But that is like refusing to accept the law of gravity because you don't like to fall. It simply ignores reality. Tigers and lions, like diamonds and rubies, have economic value whether we want them to or not. Better to face and deal with the fact than to ignore it while the species continue to dwindle. Nor does acknowledging exotic animals' economic value diminish their sentimental value. An engagement ring means much more than the price tag it carries.

The other reason conservationists oppose allowing market economics to protect wild animals is that they doubt it will work. As Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for the World Wildlife Fund, wrote about Mitra's proposal, "If China were to lift its 1993 ban on domestic trade in tiger parts, the incentives for poachers would be even greater, as there would be no way to distinguish the bones of 'farmed' tigers from those of wild tigers."

But this, too, ignores reality. Just as legalizing beverage alcohol allowed legitimate producers to undercut the bootleggers, legalizing the trade in tiger parts would create an economic incentive for ranchers to raise -- and protect -- them while reducing the incentive for poachers to poach them. When is the last time you read about poachers decimating a herd of cattle?

Turning economic incentives in the big cats' favor won't address every problem they face, such as the loss of habitat. But at least it would give them what decades of prohibition have not: a fighting chance.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .