It is not who you are, but what you wear: In a religious context, tiger rugs are related to the tiger skin loin cloths seen in painted images of fierce (wrathful) Tibetan Buddhist gods. The tiger skin is believed to provide protection to a person engaged in meditation. Female wrathful gods sport snow leopard spot loin cloths, and old Tibetan rugs are occasionally found with leopard spots too.

Tiger Fashion Change: China changed its stance in the 1980s and became a party to the CITES treaty. By 1993, it had banned the trade in tiger parts, and this diminished the use of tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine. After this, the Tibetan people’s trade in tiger skins became a relatively more important threat to tigers. The pelts were used in clothing, tiger-skin chuba being worn by singers and participants in horse racing festivals, and had became status symbols. In 2004, international conservation organizations launched successful environmental propaganda campaigns in China against the Tibetan tiger skin trade. There was outrage in India, where many Tibetans live, and the 14th Dalai Lama was persuaded to take up the issue. Since then there has been a change of attitude, with some Tibetans publicly burning their chubas.

The Threat To Tigers Continues: However, the trading of tiger parts in Asia has become a major black market industry. And governmental and conservation attempts to stop it have been ineffective to date. Almost all black marketers engaged in the trade are based in China and have either been shipped and sold within in their own country or into Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. The Chinese subspecies was almost completely decimated by killing for commerce due to both the parts and skin trades in the 1950s through the 1970s.

Contributing to the illegal trade, there are a number of tiger farms in the country specializing in breeding the cats for profit. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 captive-bred, semi-tame animals live in these farms today. Unfortunately, many tigers for traditional medicine black market are wild ones shot or snared by poachers and may be caught anywhere in the tiger’s remaining range (from Siberia to India to the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra).

In the Asian black market, a tiger penis can be worth the equivalent of around $300 U.S. dollars. In the years of 1990 through 1992, 27 million products with tiger derivatives were found. In July 2014 at an international convention on endangered species in Geneva, Switzerland, a Chinese representative admitted for the first time his government was aware of the trading in tiger skins occurring in China.