Earlier today, I came across this shocking headline: “China still selling ‘tiger bone wine’ in its animal parks.”

“Still?”

I’d never heard of “tiger bone wine” at all, so that qualification was jarring. The article goes on to report that

Evidence emerged when researchers from a UK based agency, namely the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who were investigating into the matter, said that they were offered drinks made from tiger carcasses soaked in rice wine.

According to the NGO, its investigators found that the wine, deemed to be a health tonic to treat conditions such as arthritis and rheumatism, was being openly advertised at the parks.

So, yeah. That’s gross and disturbing. But digging around a little more on the topic, I came across this 2007 piece in the Daily Mail, and several other points came into focus. To be clear in all that follows, I will enumerate these now, with relevant quotes:

(1) Factory farming — and, indeed, the breeding for slaughter of all sentient creatures — is a horror:

Although the Xiongsen tiger park, near Guilin in south-east China, appears to be a depressingly typical Third World zoo, with a theme park restaurant and open areas where tigers roam, it actually hides a far more sinister secret: it’s a factory farm breeding tigers to be eaten and to be made into wine.

(2) The breeding, slaughtering, and serving of sentient creatures to dining patrons — in a would-be “park” or “sanctuary,” no less — is about as ugly a thing as one could imagine:

Visitors to the park can dine on strips of stir-fried tiger with ginger and Chinese vegetables. Also on the menu are tiger soup and a spicy red curry made with tenderised strips of the big cat. Visitors can wash it all down with a glass or two of wine made from Siberian tiger bones.

(3) The “localvore” mentality — as it’s faddishly become known in the dirty stupid hippie circles of the west and the small but growing contingent of Michael Pollan’s navel-gazing acolytes  — is morally bankrupt and inherently objectionable. Same goes for “conscientious omnivores,” “freegans,” “pescatarians,” and, yes, sorry, “vegetarians,” too.

A waitress at the farm’s restaurant tells me proudly: ‘The tiger meat is produced here. It’s our business. When Government officials come here, we kill a tiger for them so they have fresh meat. Other visitors are given meat from tigers killed in fights. We now have 140 tigers in the freezer.

“We also sell lion meat, bear’s paw, crocodile and snake. The bear’s paw has to be ordered in advance as it takes a long time to cook.”

(4) The trade in endangered species of animals is particularly reprehensible:

The waitress clearly does not care that she is selling meat and wine from endangered species. She is not worried that selling them is against Chinese and international law, and helps to fuel the poaching that is driving tigers to extinction.

(5) There is also something particularly reprehensible about the caging and ill-treatment of creatures whose instinct is to roam and to be solitary. This is, of course, also true of animals who are naturally social but who, under our current regime of isolation and death, suffer and die invariably alone:

Tigers are naturally solitary creatures that roam over dozens of square miles, so it’s hardly surprising that life in the cages drives them insane. I saw numerous examples of stress-related repetitive behaviour.

(6) This is extremely fucked up, but fairly similar in its Colloseum-style cruelty to rodeos, the Running of the Bulls, and much else besides:

They are not the only animals killed. For entertainment, visitors to the animal park can watch the ‘live killing exhibition’, a sick spectacle in which animals are ‘hunted’ and torn to pieces by tigers while onlookers cheer.

I watched in horror as a young cow was stalked and caught by a tiger. Its screams filled the air as it struggled.

A wild tiger would dispatch its prey within moments, but these tigers’ natural killing skills have been blunted by years of captivity. The tiger tried to kill – tearing, biting at the cow’s body in a pathetic-looking frenzy – but it simply didn’t know how. Eventually, the keepers stepped in and put the cow out of its misery.

That’s about halfway through the Daily Mail piece, and about all I’ve got in me to re-read and to cite. It can be read in full, again, here.

The larger point is that the author is shocked — shocked – to discover such reprehensible treatment of animals. That’s understandable, and certainly the last thing I want to do is minimize the horror of all of this; such behavior is grotesque and an awful reflection on our species as a whole.

But the xenophobia barely kept under wraps, the incredible and incredibly obvious, double-standard of the outrage!  After all, the same article could be written about the U.K., the U.S., or the west in general — provided we replace “tiger” with “chicken/turkey/pig/cow” in all relevant sentences. The same level of contempt is there, the same abnegation of kinship and respect, the same standing apart from:

Having spent their lives in tiny, battery-style units, they cannot hunt and would be dead within days of being released. Each shed at the tiger farm – and I saw at least 100 – houses between three and five tigers in a space no larger than a typical family living room. In relative terms, they have about as much space as a battery hen.

The animals have all been bred on the farm. The cubs are taken from their mothers at three months and put in a kindergarten. I saw around 30 tiger cubs in this creche, where they stay until they are old enough to be transferred to the battery units.

Many of the youngsters kept leaping at the fencing. The younger ones simply wanted to play like kittens. The older cubs were already showing signs of stress.

Heart-breaking. But please note that the author does not call for any change in attitude towards actual battery hens — those abused creatures who do the heavy lifting for the metaphor above — anywhere in this article. And why would he? Hens are not granted admittance into the select group of “animals whose suffering is worthy of outrage.” And tigers are.

Yes, battery hens are one thing, but “we” would never breed and slaughter tigers! They are too laden with social, rhetorical, and semantic value; they are too “majestic;” they are … well, too fuzzy.

The comments posted to that page speak for themselves. That the Chinese government is oppressive, that the breeding and slaughter of sentient creatures like tigers is reprehensible, that this ought to be opposed and stopped … of course.

But the fact is that the births, miserable lives, and unhappy deaths of these tigers are identical in structure and moral standing to what transpires everyday in “our” enlightened corner of the world, except that we kill the right creatures, stamp their bodies with “sustainably raised and humanely slaughtered” imprints, and sell them for astronomical rates at boutique groceries.

That’s all.