Why White Tigers Should Go Extinct

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/12/white_tiger_controversy_zoos_shouldn_t_raise_these_inbred_ecologically_irrelevant.html

by onemach • 14 years ago

209 78 14 years ago

slate.com

sonabinu• 14 years ago

I thought the white tigers were Siberian tigers. Thanks for the information.

maxharris2• 14 years ago

I don't accept the premise that whatever man touches is somehow automatically tainted or corrupted. Nor do I accept the premise that man is somehow unnatural. All things, including men, obey the laws of thermodynamics.

There is no problem with man changing the course of nature. Why not release some white tigers and actually see how they evolve, instead of simply assuming that they won't thrive?

manojlds2• 14 years ago

Where is the assumption? How will a tiger that can be easily spotted, is cross eyed and has problems including kidney failure supposed to survive in the wild?

maxharris2• 14 years ago

From an evolutionary standpoint, all that matters is that the tiger is able to reproduce. If it isn't, an attempt to introduce the breed somewhere will fail. No big deal.

...unless you hold the tiger in your mind in the same way you would your own house cat. But that's warped, because a house cat can't and won't eat you.

I still think the claims of all these problems with captive tigers are overblown. Animals in the wild have plenty of health problems. The difference is that there aren't nearly as many people scrutinizing and treating them.

theshadow• 14 years ago

Did you read the article? It clearly states that the "species" is unstable, prone to health problems and has major reproductive issues. What do you expect is going to happen if they are in the wild?

simonsarris• 14 years ago

Well, that's true of a lot of dog breeds, especially ones with very long or very short noses. Massive reproductive issues and would not survive in the wild.

French bulldogs have to be almost exclusively birthed by C-section, because their heads are so big, and the females typically need to be inseminated by artificial insemination, because the males have a very hard time mounting females.

But they're very popular and widespread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Bulldog#Health

antidaily• 14 years ago

nuff said http://cdn.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/inb...

mscarborough• 14 years ago

Release them where? And to "thrive" like the general tiger population?

Nothing in this article posits the premises you argue against.

pavanky• 14 years ago

> I don't accept the premise that whatever man touches is somehow automatically tainted or corrupted.

That is not what the author is pointing to at all! Nothing even remotely close to it.

> There is no problem with man changing the course of nature.

Of course not, look at all the dogs we have. Not many have issues with it. But some of the breeds are just bred for humans to go "awww", that we do not consider how many of these breeds have high risk of disease and death.

> Why not release some white tigers and actually see how they evolve, instead of simply assuming that they won't thrive?

There are already 4000 tigers in the wild. The author is not asking for planned execution, but to put an end to the inbreeding programs disguised as "conservation efforts". Also the gene in the wild for thousands of years before humans started breeding them selectively. And that gene did not win out the evolutionary race.

wpietri• 14 years ago

Why in the would we introduce an artificial species to compete with existing endangered species in a shrinking ecosystem?

bluedanieru2• 14 years ago

>I don't accept the premise that whatever man touches is somehow automatically tainted or corrupted. Nor do I accept the premise that man is somehow unnatural.

I accept both, and especially the second, but I'm not anti-human or anything. It's just that we have really, really, rocketed past the rest of life on Earth, evolutionarily speaking. We destroy species, entire ecosystems, accidentally with little effort and often without even noticing until after the fact, if we notice at all. We are probably within the next 100-500 years going to reach a point where the existence of other life on Earth is not necessary for our survival. We have already passed the point where we can kill off most of it, perhaps all.

So, I don't know if you could say we have a "responsibility" to other life on Earth (although I tend to think we do), but, if we want to keep it around in anything resembling its current form, we do have to consider ourselves as apart from it in some sense. If we engage the rest of life on Earth as equals, we will likely kill most or all of it off, because there really is no contest.

manojlds2• 14 years ago

After reading this, I googled to confirm that white elephants, which I thought to be natural too, are indeed natural. They are.

Shenglong2• 14 years ago

A white tiger that has already been born does not have a vote in the matter and cannot apologize for existing. Humanity has a collective responsibility to care for the two-headed calves and white tigers that we create for our own entertainment, but do we really need to be creating more of the genetic disasters that pull resources away from truly endangered species? There is no good reason to breed another white tiger.

I'm trying to understand the moral implications here. The author paints a very heart-touching and grim picture, and it's tempting to agree. But what happens when you apply this to humans?

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

Did you even read the article? The tigers were intentionally inbred to spread this mutation. There is no analog of this in humans; inbreeding is unnecessary and does no tiger a favor by continuing it.

Drakim• 14 years ago

Exactly. One has to realize what is being argued for, not going around the globe murdering white tigers, but to stop contiguously inbreeding them to maintain the strange white fur.

rymith• 14 years ago

Oh, you mean the way we did so with wolves to create the thousands of dog species that exist today. By this absurd logic, all dogs should go extinct.

Shenglong2• 14 years ago

I'm not talking about the methodology; I'm talking about the results. The result of inbreeding is genetic insufficiency for survival - and there are a lot of human traits that have been preserved that are not fit for survival either. Yet, we don't forbid breeding for specific traits.

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

They really could have picked a better title. White tigers, being a mutation, will continue to happen naturally even if not selected for. (Much less frequently of course)

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

"Go extinct" doesn't mean "be all killed" or "be violently sterilized". It means that we should stop breeding these unnatural and disadvantaged animals. The white tigers that exist would live comfortable lives in captivity (because they can't survive in the wild) and die naturally of age. Everything about their lives is already artificial, but animals don't seem to need or enjoy sex in the general sense in a way that humans do (they have no interest when not in heat) and therefore it's not inhumane to prevent them from breeding.

For a more severe and human example, people who have a high likelihood of carrying the recessive Taysach's gene are often tested. If they both are carriers, they adopt, rather than taking a 1-in-4 chance of having a child who will die horribly. If one is a carrier and the other is not, then it's no problem. No one is being sterilized; it's positive, voluntary eugenics and it's a good thing.

true_religion• 14 years ago

According to the Cincinnati zoo example, white tigers are apparently being bred for profit, and kept in captivity. So I'm unsure how they are disadvantaged anymore so than say pure-bred dogs with physical problems that mongrels don't tend to have.

dsrguru• 14 years ago

Applying this to humans would mean if we were currently inbreeding slaves with Down syndrome to produce children with the same condition for entertainment purposes, that we should stop doing that. I'd agree.

Edit: Shenglong, just saw your response under this post's sibling. The point is not that the author argues for the human-led removal of unnecessary traits. It's that we should not spread misinformation and continue to go out of our way to create those traits. In the specific case of the white tiger, such behavior results in really harmful genetic defects that could result in the extinction of tigers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tiger#Genetic_defects).

freshhawk3• 14 years ago

Well ... if anyone was purposefully inbreeding humans so they had disfigurements that people would pay to look at then I would hope we would do the same thing suggested for the tigers. Stop doing that immediately.

jacob019• 14 years ago

The real crime is misinformation. If everyone read this article the problem would go away.

duopixel• 14 years ago

Most people are aware that animals in circuses don't live a happy life, yet they choose to go see them.

lmm• 14 years ago

I was under the impression circuses with animals were dying out, at least in civilized countries.

jmilloy• 14 years ago

You're assuming that with correct information comes correct/moral behavior, and that it's clear what that behavior is.

Hawkee• 14 years ago

I asked my wife what she knows about white tigers and she said, "Isn't it some sort of gene that makes them white, and aren't they kinda sick?" Better than I would have said before reading this.

vermontdevil• 14 years ago

Have you seen pictures?

Here's one:

http://i.imgur.com/LEj1n.jpg

There's a lot more out there like this.

neic• 14 years ago

Just a thought: I wonder if we could help the awareness of white tigers by making a meme with a picture of a defect white tiger that look "fun". Similar to all of these [0]. By spreading the awareness of the white tiger more more people seek information on them and hopefully more would be enlighted of their bad shape.

[0] https://www.google.dk/search?q=animal+meme&hl=en&tbm...

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

What do you do then when people decide they are "cute", and we should breed even more?

meaty• 14 years ago

I took in a cat from a shelter that looked worse than that. No shit. Its face had a tumor from birth to the point it couldn't meow - just make farting noises, much to everyone's amusement.

smsm42• 14 years ago

It is fascinating how much of preservation effort is related to cuteness. If the animal is not cute, who cares. If you manage to snap a cute photo of it - get ready to get millions of financing.

mgarfias• 14 years ago

I'd like to schutzhund train one. Or maybe it's schutzkatze?

bluehat• 14 years ago

As somebody who works for a 501c3... why is there such poor accountability that funding for species preservation is being used on white tigers? If I'm not mistaken, a lot of zoo money is nonprofit money. If we can prove to grant-writers and donors that the money is being used outside of what it was intended for normally the money dries up. Seems like that would solve the problem pretty quickly...

kruipen• 14 years ago

This article clarified in my mind what it was that had been bothering me about slate.com. It is tabloid for "sophisticates".

wink• 14 years ago

  Many of the venues that display white tigers have a long
  history of shading the truth about their mutants.

IIRC in the Singapore Zoo (the last one I went to this summer) had some extensive information about the origins of the white tigers, no shading this. Would've been interesting to see some more examples of different takes of the zoos in the article.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

Or they could do what cattlemen do: systematic outbreeding, and culling of defectives. Excessive inbreeding is not the only choice.

draq• 14 years ago

The question here, as I understand, is not whether breeding programmes are ethical, but whether misleading the general population with false information is ethical.

Is it ethical to ask for donations or ticket prices to zoos by giving people the impression that their money will (partially) go to conservation efforts, while the money is spent to breed animals that cannot survive in the wild but only for "marketing" purposes?

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

Slate keeps impressing me with thought-provoking articles.

beloch• 14 years ago

If you'd like more in depth look at the "American Tiger", check out the Nature of Things documentary of that title.

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/american-tiger.html

It covers everything that's in this Slate article, but actually goes to the trouble of getting opinions from experts in the field of conservation, genetics, etc..

dlitz• 14 years ago

It doesn't work from the US. We just get a creepy voice that says, "This content is currently unavailable."

nu2ycombinator• 14 years ago

Wow. All these days I was thinking that white tiger is a natural habitant of siberia.

Gravityloss2• 14 years ago

There are less than four thousand tigers in total in the wild. Not white tigers, any tigers. That's shocking.

In a few decades there probably won't be any.

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/tigers/ab...

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Its true, and maybe irrelevant. There is no place for tigers on a settled planet. We have many uses for land, and letting fabulously dangerous carnivores randomly wander huge tracts is one of the less important ones.

I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.

Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.

We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.

I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.

Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.

philwelch3• 14 years ago

There has been a number of mass extinction events in world history, the most well known being the extinction of the dinosaurs. That much impact on an ecosystem all at once had massive, unpredictable effects.

At current rates, we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I am not fond of making large, random changes to complex systems that affect us.

Gravityloss2• 14 years ago

We get into value questions really quickly. It is hard to spell them out explicitly.

For example if 90% of land is used for farming and cities, why not save the rest 10% for wild animals? The gain from changing that into farmland as well seems minimal, but the loss very large - it can be complete for those species that are destroyed.

I've never understood the very hard line against forest conservation in my country either. If the environmental folks are proposing 5 to 10 percent of forests being put under conservation, is that such a big loss to the economy? For many species that live in old forests there might be only a few habitats left in the country.

What is the ultimate objective, or the meaning of life? Maximizing human biomass? Does that goal justify us to destroy everything else in process? Do tigers really have no value for you whatsoever?

I've seen big cats in the zoo and it seems they have gone mentally insane, repeating same movements etc.

We have brown bears over here. You're lucky to see one as they are really good at avoiding people. I don't think people have problems with them unless they (the people) do something stupid. Mites, wasps, dogs and horses kill much more people every year.

DannyBee• 14 years ago

It's funny that this is panda.org, since panda's are another species likely to go extinct without human intervention (they are dysfunctional in their ability to mate once captured), and intervention appears to be mainly based on cuteness

Why White Tigers Should Go Extinct

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