The symposium was held in Hong Kong over December 7 and 8, 1997. As the first time ever that the worlds of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and conservationists met, it provided some interesting lessons.

Now to the lessons. For one thing, TCM practitioners:

• misunderstand the motives of conservationists or the logic of conservation and biodiversity;
• feel severely under pressure from conservationists as well as the more modern Chinese public who are veering away from TCM towards western medicine;
• present the implication of cultural superiority that the ''western'' notion of conservation (or indeed medicine) implies;
• are troubled by misinformation on TCM perpetuated by the western media.

The motives and logic of conservation

At one point, after Peter Jackson had finished a short presentation on the status of tigers in the wild, a Chinese delegate asked why it was so important to preserve the tiger since it was a dangerous animal and its presence conflicted with the needs of human populations.

To me this illustrated the misunderstanding of the logic of conservation - as well as the Chinese attitude (when I say Chinese it's only in this context and is not meant as a generalisation specific to Chinese; frankly it's the attitude of most people whatever their race/nationality) of seeing animals in general as things to be USED by and for humans.

TCM practitioners certainly think so. We were presented a lot of data on the comparative medical efficacy of various types of bone, and the bones of a kind of mole rat from high altitude plateaux was identified by a researcher as a viable alternative to tiger bone. Significantly, he said there were hundreds of thousands of the rodent, and it was classified as vermin.

Ironically, one remembers that the tiger was once classified as vermin in parts of Indochina.

But the point is the attitude - that we will move from animal to animal in search of these ingredients. In this sense, despite the hope held out for the mole rat, the conservationist community should recognise the warning signals before it is too late : if over the next ten years the tiger population is significantly reduced and they become even rarer, the black market will shift to other big cats and eventually to lesser cats!

Under pressure/changing times and western cultural superiority

TCM practitioners feel they're getting a raw deal. For a start, most TCM practitioners the world over are from a slightly older generation, and have a poor understanding of things like CITES treaties, sometimes simply because their English is not very good.

Second, they feel the west is beating up on TCM. They are hurt by this. Speakers at the conference repeatedly stated - somewhat defensively - that TCM was a treasured 2,000-year-old tradition. One American speaker came in for a blast of criticism from one of the Chinese delegates for being patronising about TCM.

This same delegate - a TCM practitioner - had a fit when another Chinese delegate (Zhang Endi, Wildlife Conservation Society) who has worked to raise awareness for wildlife conservation in two or three cities including Shanghai cited survey results that showed about half the respondents chose western medicine as a first line of referral, using TCM as a second line or in a complementary role.

The critical delegate heckled Mr Zhang from the audience, saying he didn't know what he was talking about and that his survey was ''ridiculous.''

Another elderly Chinese practitioner of TCM who has pioneered the modernisation of TCM (Lao Yiu-ching, Institute of Modern Chinese Medicine, Hongkong, who actually used the Chinese equivalent of the word ''myth'' when describing tiger bone's properties) gave a presentation in which he cited several cases which he and his colleagues had successfully treated without using tiger bone. His aim was to show that, without denying the medical properties of tiger bone, other treatments were just as good.

''I hope our colleagues can have an open attitude'' he said.

But that was wishful thinking; he was also roundly criticised for being one-dimensional and inaccurate by two of his fellow TCM practitioners in the audience.

One Chinese delegate (based in England) mentioned in a presentation that TCM practitioners were as endangered as some species of wildlife. The friction within the Chinese delegates at the symposium definitely underscored the sense of persecution that TCM practitioners have.

Media misinformation

A couple of speakers cited a slew of media reports that they said spread misinformation and hurt the reputation and morale of TCM practitioners . . . .

Much of it is not new to conservationists who know their subject. The instances included reputable magazines and newspapers saying tiger bone and rhino horn is used as an aphrodisiac by ''Asians.''

Speaker Chang Hsien-cheh from Taiwan (School of Chinese Medicine, China Medical College, Taichung) made a pertinent point when he said substitutes for tiger bone had always been available. TCM traders would ask customers if they wanted genuine goods or ''common'' goods. Besides this, there were dozens and dozens of products that claimed to contain tiger bone but didn't.

''Most tiger bones are actually goat bones'' he said.

Tiger bones were also difficult to identify as such, confusing the issue further. A well-known magazine once printed a picture of a tiger penis; it was actually a fake/substitute from another species.

He added that in Taiwan, TCM traders have ceased stocking tiger bone products - or products claiming to contain tiger bone, because the police have been cracking down on them.

Analyses of tiger bone and the bones of selected other species was presented. Tiger was proven to be not significantly different in composition, if at all, from other species' bones, for instance that of pigs, dogs and cows.
According to speaker Henry Chu (Chinese Medicinal Material Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hongkong), the bones of the Sailonggu (a high-altitude, burrow-dwelling, non-hibernating rodent which appeared to be a kind of mole rat, and apparently numbers in the hundreds of thousands) holds out the best hope for a substitute. Sailonggu wine is already commercially available at RMB 25 (US$ 3) a bottle.

''We hope people can do away with the myth of tiger bone'' Mr Chu said.

Comment

From the information thrown up by the conference, it seems to me that tiger products will continue to be used regardless of excellent available substitutes. Given the fact that other animals' bones are not significantly different, if at all, it leads one to conclude that tiger products are also sought after because of perception/what the tiger represents.

If the tiger was a small rat it wouldn't be in such demand, for example. Also, the fact that there is a lot of fake tiger bone floating around in the TCM market leads one to suspect that there is a certain placebo effect for those who consume it believing it's from a tiger. It could be leopard bone, or bones from some other big or lesser cat, or indeed goat bone.

There is a marketing problem here : how to get people to accept substitutes? Tiger products are illegal, but as we know they can be obtained at a price. If a consumer can afford a tiger product, he will surely get one rather than settling for a Sailonggu-wine substitute, or perhaps pig bone, which has similar medical effects.

This ''stubborn residual market'' is exactly the problem - because of course there are not enough tigers left to support it if the prevailing situation continues.
In an Asian Wall Street Journal article (issue of Dec 8) on the conference, Diane Brady quoted delegate Angi Ma Wong, a California-based ''intercultural'' consultant, on the subject of substituting tiger bone for pig bone: ''The pig just doesn't have the same mystique. It's like shopping for leather goods at Chanel and then suddenly switching to K-Mart.''

Some Facts . . .

According to research presented (which was however mildly disputed at the conference), the following is the prevalence of the use of endangered species (both plants and animals) in TCM:

Data on north America was not available, but in Europe the number of TCM traders was given as about 10,000 - mostly in the UK and Germany.

In the UK, Operation Charm (a police operation) evolved a sticker for TCM traders which stated that they did not stock tiger products. Over 100 TCM traders qualified for the window sticker.

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