I've been working in the area behind Nirvana for the past several days and have had the pleasure of hearing tour guides talking about the white tiger issue.  I have heard the amazement in the voices of the guests as they learned that every thing they thought knew about white tigers was wrong.

I have heard guests try to argue the facts or ignore the new information by proclaiming that they still think white tigers are beautiful.  It has given me a new appreciation for what all of you go through when giving tours.  It especially impresses me that some of you, who are still so new to the knowledge yourselves, manage to be firm in your presentations while still being kind to the guests.

This week a thirty year old secret was exposed in Newsweek, the second largest weekly magazine in America.  Sharyn Beach exposed it in Britannica Online Encyclopedia in March of this year.  It is the same secret that Big Cat Rescue exposed 11 years ago as the first organization to go public with the truth about the white tiger.

What I knew in 1998 was that people could sell a white tiger cub for $60,000 and just about all of the breeders and dealers and zoos were out to breed them.  I had been to facilities such as the one where Shere Khan was born, and where Modnic, TJ & Bella came from and where Auroara had come from.  What I saw haunted me because I saw many tigers who had horrible deformities;  teeth going in all directions, eyes out on the nose, clubbed feet and lame hips.

These birth defects were primarily in the white tigers, but some of their golden litter mates were affected as well.  I started asking about who the tigers' parents were, who their siblings were, and discovered that people were inbreeding these cats.  They never used that word, but rather would say "line breeding" or "selective breeding" or they would make outrageous claims about how they had "created" a line of white tigers by choosing the best pairings. In 1998 there were only 200 white tigers world wide.  With Siegfried and Roy promoting white tigers as Royal White Bengal tigers the breeders scurried to meet demand.

Especially complicit were the Cincinnati Zoo & the Nashville Zoo who knew that the origins of white tigers only came from severe inbreeding.  It was common knowledge to breeders that there was an 80% mortality rate.  They should have put an end to it right then and there, but white tigers were a novelty and people would pay to see them.  The accredited zoos, who actually keep pedigrees on their tigers, knew that inbreeding was the only way to increase their probability of getting that money making white cub.

In 1998 I still thought that most of the breeders and dealers out there were just ignorant.  I was a member of AZA and had been attending their conferences and meeting their cat experts to find out what they thought to be best practices.  I thought that if the private sector knew better they would behave better and so I spent a lot of time writing articles for their club called the Feline Conservation Federation.  I was part of their list serve and participated in discussions about exotic cat husbandry in the hopes of helping their cats have better lives.  We had only had the Internet for a couple of years and were still trying to find ways to use it to band all exotic cat owners together for a comprehensive repository of information on best practices.  Our own website had only been up for two years and I was using it as a way of making all of the lessons we had learned available for everyone else.  I figured the reason all of these breeders had so many defective tigers was because they didn't know that they were all so inbred and they were just making it worse by not keeping records.

I proposed all of what I knew about white tigers on our website and suggested that we create a registry of all of the cats in the private sector, along with micro chipping, to make sure that no more cats suffered from such terrible birth defects.  I quickly learned that the people making money off the white tigers knew what they were doing and ignored the agony they were inflicting.

About a year later a veterinarian wrote to me after finding our white tiger page on the Internet.  He said that we were the only people telling the truth and that he had the full story because he had been the veterinarian for the Las Vegas duo for many years, as well as the vet for several large zoos.  He had worked with 250 tigers.  He spent 20 years documenting the origins and malpractice involved in breeding white tigers and had never found a way to make his findings publicly known. The zoos didn't want anyone to know.  Dr. Dan Laughlin and I spent hours on the phone pouring over the documents he had sent me to convince me of his credentials and his findings.

We launched his letter on our website which culminated in his statement, "...every white tiger in the U.S. is not only the result of repeated inbreeding of genetically defective animals but, even worse, is a hybrid or crossbred animal. Thus, anyone involved in breeding and/or exhibiting white tigers is doing a great disservice to honest conservation and preservation efforts to save the five remaining and endangered subspecies of tigers barely clinging to survival..."

We also quoted Ron Tilson, the head of the tiger species survival plan who said, "The white tiger controversy among zoos is a small part ethics and a large part economics. The tiger Species Survival Plan has condemned breeding white tigers because of their mixed ancestry, most have been hybridized with other subspecies and are of unknown lineage, and because they serve no conservation purpose..."

"However, there is an unspoken issue that shames the very integrity of zoos, their alleged conservation programs and their message to the visiting public. To produce white tigers or any other phenotypic curiosity, directors of zoos and other facilities must continuously inbreed father to daughter and father to granddaughter and so on. At issue is a contradiction of fundamental genetic principles upon which all Species Survival Plans for endangered species in captivity are based. White tigers are an aberration artificially bred and proliferated by some zoos, private breeders and a few circuses who do so for economic rather than conservation reasons."

Our tour guides began sharing this information with our visitors.  We began writing letters to USDA, state wildlife agencies and to the media to raise awareness about the horrific practice of inbreeding to get white tigers.

The breeders, dealers, zoos and circus acts who were profiting from white tigers saw us as public enemy number one.  There was no way they could prove the outrageous stories they were promoting about how these cats came from hidden islands, or were the product of their animal husbandry genius.  If anyone looked beyond the image in front of them, they would find out the truth and that would mean the end of their profits.  White tiger sales began to plummet, both from the over abundance of animals born and because more people were becoming aware of the inbreeding.  I have seen white tiger cubs selling for as little as 1000.00.  I have lost track of the number of adults who were offered to us for free and sometimes people even offering to pay us to take them so they could make space for more cubs.

The people who went from making 60,000 for a white cub to only 1000 for a white cub have no excuse for what they do.  The only thing they can do is to try and discredit us.  That is why they are always attacking us, and me in particular. I feel for you guys because it can be scary to have people say such horrible things about you, or Big Cat Rescue, if you speak out in a public forum.

Someone asked me recently Zuzana Kukol who posts the REXANO site has a full time person dedicated only to tracking my postings so they can go on there and talk all kinds of trash about me.  Little do they realize that it just makes them look stupid and is actually helping us show the world what kind of person would breed white tigers.

Thanks to the pressure that Big Cat Rescuers have kept on them, the AZA came out with a policy statement against breeding white tigers fairly recently, even though they do not yet enforce it strongly.

It is so exciting to me to see that we have persevered through more than a decade of trying to get the world to see that breeding white tigers (especially) is cruel and unconscionable.  To see Britannica and Newsweek running stories that tell the truth is a HUGE win!  This was the headline caption for the Newsweek story this past week, "Bred for profit, the animals are often cruelly deformed by inbreeding."  The only reason this is happening is because of you.  No one else was willing to take on the Goliath of zoos, circuses and Las Vegas (where REXANO is based).  The day is coming when no more tigers will be purposely inbred to create a freak for the paying public.  That day is coming because Big Cat Rescuers won't give up until it does.

Carole Baskin, CEO of BigCatRescue.org