Meng Meng enjoys one of the most expensive luxury apartments in Beijing, with maintenance costs alone running over a million yuan each year. She has her own kitchen staff, VIP valet service, air conditioning and an ornamental garden where she is often seen frolicking with her friends and nibbling on bamboo shoots for lunch, with oranges and honey for dessert.

Meng Meng is pampered at government expense because she is a giant panda, the hug-gable creature that has unofficially replaced the dragon as the emblem of China.

Meanwhile, in China's frigid northeast, far from the Beijing Zoo, three more of China's national treasures are clinging to life in a Siberian tiger cage, being fed intravenously in a wildlife park where 11 rare tigers recently starved to death.

In China's wilderness, Siberian tigers eat up to 40 pounds of raw meat a day from fresh kills of wild hogs and Tibetan antelope. At the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo in the capital of Liaoning Province, the world's biggest cats were fed only chicken bones.

The income gap between China's rich and poor is once again at the heart of the problem, with the profit motive extending even to the animal kingdom. There are reports that the Shenyang zoo was financially strapped and zookeepers hadn't been paid in 18 months.

At the Beijing zoo, rich people can pay an extra 700 yuan to pet a panda. In Shenyang, zoo keepers reported that the bones of the dead tigers were ground up to make tiger liquor and soup served to visiting government officials.

Although tiger bones are revered in traditional Chinese medicine, the belief is a triumph of superstition over science, with no evidence that tiger bones can build strength. Nevertheless, black market demand remains high in China, and is the greatest cause of poaching in the wild and over breeding in tiger farms.

Experts believe the global wild tiger population has fallen to below 3,000. This doesn't mean the magnificent beasts will be extinct by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. There are an es-timated 5,000 captive Siberian tigers in China and another 8,000 worldwide – kept as zoo exhibits, livestock and circus animals. In the US state of Texas alone, there are more Siberian tigers in captivity than in wilderness sanctuaries around the globe.

Officials estimate that only about 20 Siberian tigers are left in the wild in China. Like the giant panda, they are endangered species under China's wildlife law, but the law doesn't apply to zoos and tiger farms.

So why not release more tigers into the wild? The usual argument for keeping them caged is that they were born in captivity, have lost their jungle instinct, and can't survive in their natural habitat. This sounds like nonsense when you consider how well they attack human trespassers in their artificial habitats.

Does anyone seriously believe that the uncaged Siberian tiger would famish in the Tibetan forests with all those antelope for prey? If people were really serious about restoring the balance of nature, they would give caged tigers a fighting chance to become wild tigers rather than starve to death on chicken bones and become somebody's dubious cure for aches and pains.