More tigers live in captivity in the United States than exist in the wild globally, and large-scale captive tiger operations raise profound welfare and conservation concerns.
Tigers in inadequate captive facilities experience severe welfare deprivation. These large, solitary apex predators have enormous territorial ranges in the wild; confinement in small cages prevents the locomotor activity essential for physical and psychological wellbeing. Social conditions in private facilities often involve inappropriate grouping or isolation. Cub petting operations, now banned in the US, removed cubs from mothers at birth for handling by tourists, causing acute social disruption and denying cubs normal behavioural development. Tigers at tiger farms in Southeast Asia are kept in barren conditions, sometimes in high density, and may be slaughtered at economically optimal weight for their body parts. The welfare harm occurs at an enormous scale and is compounded by the conservation damage of perpetuating demand for tiger products that drives poaching of wild tigers.