Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [142]
I found this an interesting approach to wildlife, and to learn more I headed toward the Siberian Tiger Park a short distance outside Harbin. There are only about 500 Siberian Tigers remaining in the wild, roaming across a vast terrain in Russia and northern China. To boost these numbers, China has a breeding program where tigers born on the grounds of the Siberian Tiger Park would eventually be released into the wild, free to live out their lives as nature intended. I’d bought a ticket at the park’s entrance and joined a handful of convivial Chinese tourists inside a minibus and spent the next ten minutes having my picture taken next to them. Soon, we set forth. We made our way through a fenced enclosure, meandered past a frozen pond and acres of high brown grass and scrubby trees, and I took note of mysterious piles of chicken feathers and—good Lord, those tigers are big. I did not know this, but the Siberian Tiger is immense. There were six of them, the largest nearly ten feet long. I had not seen ten-foot cats before. I’d always assumed lions, king of the jungle and all, to be the largest feline. But in comparison to a Siberian Tiger, a lion is a mere house cat. There was one, no two, three now, up on their hind legs, huge paws on our windows, their striped faces and teeth just inches away—
This was a minivan we were in. No cages. No bumpers. No reinforced glass. Nothing.
And I remembered that two people had already been killed by these tigers inside the Siberian Tiger Park, and when I’d read this, I’d wondered how this could happen, what circumstances had prevailed when these two people were killed, and suddenly a white, caged SUV shot past us.
The tigers went nuts. They leapt toward this SUV, which had skidded to a stop, sending dust billowing into the wind. And suddenly, quickly, so quickly, a door was opened, a hand was exposed, and it was clutching chickens, live chickens, and very quickly, desperately, these chickens were tossed into the air and the tigers, these enormous creatures, pounced. They surged upon the SUV. They leapt upon its roof and the chickens—the chickens were no more. Four times this happened. The SUV driver lurched here and there, sending forth plumes of dust, and the hand of a crazy man would emerge with live chickens, and the tigers, nearly as big as the SUV, growled and snarled and pounced and gobbled.
So today was chicken day. But it’s a varied diet that the tigers here at the Siberian Tiger Park receive. Sometimes live ox are deposited inside the park. At other times, it’s live cows. Sometimes pigs. They take care of the tigers here. Okay, true, they had developed a taste for farm animals, had come to associate human beings and SUVs with feeding time, and were thus forever doomed in the wild. They would gravitate toward people and they would kill people and they would be shot and their paws would end up in the market in Guangzhou. But the important thing here is that we were having fun. My fellow passengers oohed and aahed and snapped pictures. It was party time on the minibus. Never more so than when we retreated through the automatic gate and a tiger cleverly followed us out. A Siberian Tiger was loose here on the outskirts of Harbin. What would be the solution here, I wondered, to the problem of Siberian Tigers wandering outside the confines of the Siberian Tiger Park?
A demolition derby.
That is what we did. Our minibus charged at this Siberian Tiger. The horn blared. A moment later, the SUV returned, and together we charged at this tiger, backward, forward, we lurched at this tiger. We played chicken with him. The