BEIJING (Reuters) - One hundred tigers and 2,000 alligators have been flown from Thailand to China to grace an animal park where visitors will be able to admire and eat some of the creatures displayed, a park official says.
The Bengal tigers and Siam alligators were biding their time in a breeding centre after arriving in Hainan island on Tuesday, before moving into the "Sanya Love World" theme park ahead of its opening next year.
Visitors will be able to have their photos taken alongside the big cats and feed them. There will also be pig races and elephant shows, said an official from Sanya Maitree Concept, a Sino-Thai joint venture.
"We will also build restaurants to let people taste alligator meat, pharmacies for alligator medicine and build leather processing centres," she said by telephone on Thursday, adding live alligators would also be displayed.
"After we have bred tigers for a few years, we might have over 1,000 of them. Tourists are likely to eat tiger meat at Sanya," she said, referring to the beach resort on tropical Hainan off mainland China's south coast.
The website www.sina.com.cn published a Jiang Nan Times story with the headline: "A hundred tigers arrive in Hainan, Sanya to allow eating tiger meat openly".
But Sanya Maitree's general manager, Chi Zengqing, played down plans to serve up tigers.
"This would be impossible, unless U.N. animal protection policies changed," he said.
"We would have the right conditions to benefit from policy changes as we will be the biggest tiger house in the world."
The tigers were provided by private Thailand Maitree Concept Limited Company, the Thai partner in the joint venture, company officials said. They declined to provide financial details.
Tigers have been bred in captivity in Thailand, where the government has long denied farming the big cats to fuel an illegal international trade of tiger bone parts, believed to wind up in some traditional Chinese medicine.
Tigers, whose populations have plummeted by more than 90 percent in the wild, are classified as endangered by the World Conservation Union, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.
GRAND PLANS
China and Thailand are signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, implemented in 1975, to regulate trade in endangered wildlife.
But tiger bones remain highly prized for their alleged medicinal qualities in China.
Many Chinese believe tiger's genitalia is an aphrodisiac.
Only a few thousand Bengal tigers are believed to survive in the wild globally, according to the WWF.
Sanya Maitree, a tie-up between state-run Sanya Tourism Investment Limited Company and Thailand Maitree, planned to import a further 18,000 Siam alligators next year, along with 20 elephants and mini Thai pigs, Chi said.
It is hoped the new animal park will be a winner among the growing ranks of China's tourists, many of whom head to the island for its palm-fringed beaches and night life.
Last year, about 11 million tourists from China and abroad visited the island, according to a local government website.
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