Dogs Painted As Pandas And Tigers

Pet owners have painted their dogs to look like other animals including pandas and tigers in the latest craze to come out of China. The pictures, which appear to have been taken at a showcase of painted dogs in Zhengzhou, eastern China, show crowds gathering to take photos of the bizarre spectacle.

In one picture a retriever has been made to look like a tiger, while in another a small, fluffy puppy has been painted in the style of a tiny panda. China has often been quick to adopt unusual crazes, and the latest trend for pet owners follows an American fad of painting poodles to look like other animals at dog shows.

China To Train Pandas To Survive In Wild

China plans to build a center where giant pandas born in captivity will be trained to survive in the wild, state media reported Thursday.The $8.8 million (60 million yuan) center will be located in Sichuan province’s Dujiangyan city, according to Zhang Zhihe, the head of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The facility is expected to house three to five giant pandas when it is completed within five years. The center will include 21.5 acres (8.7 hectares) of an experimental zone, along with 2,800 acres (1,128 hectares) of woodlands, Zhang said.Groundbreaking for the new center starts at the end of the month, Xinhua said.

Giant pandas are among the world’s most endangered species. Some 1,600 pandas live in the wild, while more than 300 pandas are raised in captivity in China.

11 Big Cats Are Found Starving To Death In China Zoo

This painfully emaciated tiger is the shocking face of China’s illegal trade in tiger bones.The image of the caged animal emerged after11 Siberian tigers were found starving to death in a scandal-plagued Chinese zoo.The Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo, which has been closed down by police, has been accused of illegally supplying tiger bones to local doctors who use them to brew traditional medicines.

But it is not the only place where tigers in China are in danger.The image of the tiger above was taken in the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park in Guilin City, China, where 1,400 tigers are kept in a space the size of Regents Park.A source said that tigers there are slowly starving as food rations are slashed to pay to run refrigerators keeping the animal’s body parts fresh to sell on the black market.Trade in the bones is banned – but the parts from one tiger can fetch up to £50,000 on the black market.

Tigers' Bodies Are Plundered To Make £185 Wine !!

Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur and bones.Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently, that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which began last Sunday.

‘What can we do?’ a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors with a sigh and a casual shrug. ‘He’s dying, of course, but we have to keep feeding him until he does. It’s against the law to kill tigers.’Instead, it seems, they die slowly of neglect. In row after row of foul, cramped cages, more tigers lie alone, crippled and dying. One is hunched up against the side of its cage with its neck grotesquely deformed. Another, blinded in one eye, lies motionless.

This shabby, rundown park in Guilin – one of China’s main tourist cities – is home to the world’s biggest single collection of tigers. Yet it is never included on foreigners’ tour itineraries.For here, 1,500 captive tigers – around half as many as there are thought to be remaining in the wild – live out miserable lives in squalid conditions.Each tiger costs around £6 a day to feed, and it is easy to see that the small clusters of visitors paying £7.50 each to wander around the cages and watch bizarre animal shows cannot possibly cover even the cost of food for the vast park.

Tigers' Bodies Are Plundered To Make £185 Wine !!

Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur and bones.Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently, that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which began last Sunday.

‘What can we do?’ a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors with a sigh and a casual shrug. ‘He’s dying, of course, but we have to keep feeding him until he does. It’s against the law to kill tigers.’Instead, it seems, they die slowly of neglect. In row after row of foul, cramped cages, more tigers lie alone, crippled and dying. One is hunched up against the side of its cage with its neck grotesquely deformed. Another, blinded in one eye, lies motionless.

This shabby, rundown park in Guilin – one of China’s main tourist cities – is home to the world’s biggest single collection of tigers. Yet it is never included on foreigners’ tour itineraries.For here, 1,500 captive tigers – around half as many as there are thought to be remaining in the wild – live out miserable lives in squalid conditions.Each tiger costs around £6 a day to feed, and it is easy to see that the small clusters of visitors paying £7.50 each to wander around the cages and watch bizarre animal shows cannot possibly cover even the cost of food for the vast park.

China Says It Has 6,000 Captive Tigers

China said Tuesday it had nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity and could breed 1,000 more every year, amid international controversy over the benefits of farming the endangered species.The numbers were announced by Yin Hong, vice head of the State Forestry Administration, according to a spokesman at the agency who refused to be named.”There are close to 6,000 tigers that have been artifically bred and raised in China,” the official China News Service quoted Yin saying.

“These tigers can breed over 1,000 baby tigers every year.”Yin’s comments came as China prepares to ring in the Year of the Tiger, which begins February 14, amid mounting worldwide concern over dwindling numbers of the great cats.Yin said there were just 50 to 60 wild tigers left in China. Conservation groups have said recently fewer than 50 still roam the country.

There are four varieties of wild tigers in China, and one of them — the South China tiger — has not been spotted in the wild since the late 1970s. In the 1950s, there were around 4,000 of the subspecies.Degradation of the animal’s habitat and poaching of the tiger and its prey are blamed for its rapid disappearance.In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try and preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild.But experts warn it will be difficult for captive tigers to re-adapt to the wild, and the sheer number of the endangered animals kept in farms now poses a challenge.

Cruel Or Cute..???

Crouching tiger, hidden species? Siberian creatures welcome in the Year of the Tiger as China worries about their extinction
The sight of tigers in the wild in China is becoming increasingly rare, but there are hundreds in zoos around the country.So as the country came to a standstill this weekend to celebrate Chinese New Year, and see in the Year of the Tiger, it seemed only natural to use several Siberian tigers to welcome visitors to a zoo in Fuzhou in southeast China’s Fujian province.However, the tigers’ poses were far from natural, as they were cruelly forced into a series of poses as they made their greeting.Sitting on their hind legs with their paws in the air, the tigers were made to hold the poses for a lengthy period of time as visitors entered the zoo.

Tokyo To Receive 2 Pandas From China Next Year

Japanese panda fans will be able to see the endangered animals in Tokyo next year for the first time since 2008, after the city reached an agreement to pay nearly $1 million a year to borrow a pair from China, officials said Friday.Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo has been without a giant panda for the first time since 1972, when a pair arrived to mark the signing of a peace treaty between Japan and China. Ling Ling, a panda who came to Tokyo in 1992, died in April 2008 at the age of 22, which in human terms is equivalent to about 70.

Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara told reporters Friday that two pandas are expected to arrive in Tokyo early next year and would cost $950,000 a year.”It’s quite a costly deal,” Ishihara said, adding that Tokyo officials bargained to get $50,000 off the original $1 million price tag. The payments will help rebuild a panda sanctuary in China’s Sichuan province and fund joint breeding projects between Japan and China, he said.

Not Just China US Under Fire For Tiger Trade

Conservationists appealed Wednesday for an end to the commercial tiger trade, warning that demand in China, Southeast Asia — but also the United States — was threatening the big cats with extinction.Environmental campaigners see 2010 as crucial to spread their message as East Asian nations celebrate the Year of the Tiger and Russia prepares to hold a summit on tiger conservation in September in Vladivostok.

Only some 3,200 tigers remain in the wild, nearly half of them in India, down from 100,000 worldwide a century ago due to burgeoning human populations and a demand in China, Vietnam and Laos for tiger parts in folk medicine.But environmental campaigners said the problem was not just in Asia. They worried about the United States, where more than 5,000 tigers are believed to be in private hands as backyard pets or roadside zoo attractions.

The World’s Rarest Cats

The 21st century is marked not only by new technologies but also by an ever growing number of extinct and endangered animals. Apart from the extinct animals we will never see, these rare felines are so few since they are either threatened by loss of habitat or they have suffered from rare color mutation. Take a look at the rarest animals in the world!

The Maltese Tiger

The Blue tiger was reported mostly from the Fujian Province of China, being characterized by a bluish fur with dark stripes. The Maltese tigers have been reported as a subspecies of the South Chinese tiger, that is critically endangered. A blue tiger cub was born in 1964, in the Oklahoma Zoo, but died in its infancy. There are no blue tigers in zoos or private collections, and no known blue tiger pelts.

The Golden Tabby Tiger

The golden tiger has its white coat and gold patches due to an extremely rare colour variation caused by a recessive gene. Around 30 tigers are believed to exist in the world but many more are carriers of the gene. Records of the golden or strawberry tiger date back to the 1900s, in India. The first golden tiger cub born in captivity was in 1983 and this came from standard colored Bengal tigers.