
Why White Tigers Should Go Extinct - onemach
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/12/white_tiger_controversy_zoos_shouldn_t_raise_these_inbred_ecologically_irrelevant.html
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Shenglong
_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
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.

~~~
rymith
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.

~~~
jwilsco
Dogs are bred to live with humans. Tigers are not.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Maybe tigers "should" be? I know quite a few people who would gladly pay for
the ability to have a domesticated tiger as a pet...

~~~
Tycho
Thing is they're about 100x more dangerous than dogs.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
But are they 100x more dangerous than the wolves from which domesticated dogs
are descended?

~~~
jlgreco
A tiger on its own, and a wolf on its own? Yeah, probably. Wolves and tigers
are both apex predators but wolves are pack animals.

~~~
philwelch
And you can only domesticate a dog by hacking its pack instinct to make it
follow you instead of another dog anyway. No such hook with a cat.

~~~
bluedanieru
Didn't Siegfried and Roy hack the maternal instinct of female cats to achieve
some semblance of domestication? I mean, it didn't work out very well of
course, because a cat mauled Roy and nearly killed him by grabbing him by the
neck (to drag him to safety, according to them) like she would a cub.

So, I think there _is_ a hook. It's just a really shitty one. Note that the
hook for dogs can backfire as well, if they try to assert pack dominance vs.
their owner. So we breed really submissive dogs.

~~~
philwelch
Tigers and especially lions are somewhat easy, not to domesticate per se but
to befriend. I wouldn't really call this a hack the way domesticating dogs was
a hack--they just seem willing to occasionally befriend humans the same way
ordinary cats do.

Tigers and lions are very confident apex predators, so they don't really have
the vicious instinct or the intense fear response that some animals have. So
they don't deliberately attack humans. By contrast, leopards and jaguars will
kill you out of sheer viciousness, bears will attack you if they feel
threatened, and polar bears will attack you because they are hungry and you
are made of meat.

The main danger with tigers and lions is that they don't really understand how
fragile humans are, so they might accidentally kill or maim you, which
happened to Roy.

------
Hawkee
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.

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bluehat
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...

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

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vermontdevil
Have you seen pictures?

Here's one:

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

There's a lot more out there like this.

~~~
neic
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...](https://www.google.dk/search?q=animal+meme&hl=en&tbm=isch)

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

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Gravityloss
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...](http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/tigers/about_tigers/tiger_population/)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
philwelch
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.

~~~
mryall
> At current rates, we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event
> worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Interesting assertion. Got a citation for that?

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

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wink

      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.

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jacob019
The real crime is misinformation. If everyone read this article the problem
would go away.

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

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

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maxharris
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?

~~~
manojlds
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?

~~~
maxharris
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.

~~~
Retric
Except there are plenty of healthy wild animals and zero healthy white tigers.
So, in the wild ALL white tigers are unable to survive long enough to
reproduce.

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

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nu2ycombinator
Wow. All these days I was thinking that white tiger is a natural habitant of
siberia.

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draq
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?

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

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b0rsuk
Slate keeps impressing me with thought-provoking articles.

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

