Ligers and Legal Constraints
Breeding a liger may face a lot of legal hurdles and issues especially, if your state has conservative policies about Big Cats. In many parts of the world crossbreeding of a male lion and female tiger may potentially put you in series of legal trouble from authorities. The authorities may confiscate your animals, impose a huge fine on you and may also put you behind jail bars as well. So if you ever plan to breed a male lion with a tigress; please have a profound look whether legal authorities will favor and encourage this crossbreeding to produce liger or not?
A real time example of a place; where cross breeding of a male lion with female tigress can put you in a big trouble is Taiwan. This country is just located near China (China considers it as its own territory) and it has very tough rules for the individuals who go for crossbreeding, especially for endangered animal species such as lions and tigers etc. It was during 2010, that a man at a Taiwanese zoo crossbred a lion and a tigress to produce three liger cubs. That man faced a huge sum of dollars as a penalty, imprisonment & bailing and also the authorities confiscated the liger cubs from that individual as well. Today only one liger cub has survived from that litter of 3 liger cubs and he is doing fine at Pingtung Rescue Center as of the year 2015.
Even some animal rights activists are against ligers and they are seeking legal hurdles for the individuals who crossbreed lion with tigers to produce ligers. They are specifically active within United States, and they are trying to propagate negative myths about ligers. So far they haven't gained any success and majority of their myths have already been busted by liger experts, especially Dr. Bhagavan Antle who has almost 4 decades of experience with ligers. They are still lobbying against ligers and if they gained any success we shall not be able to see any further ligers at some states within USA.
In Europe, Germany is such a country where ligers are bred in abundance than any other country. Germany is even known to sell ligers to many other countries. One such example of Germany selling a liger to another country was Libya. In United Kingdom animal trainers are not opting for crossbreeding of lions and tigers to produce ligers because they already know that they may face huge criticism and some legal constraints if they even cross-bred lion with a tigress to produce liger. Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy are other countries where the presence of the ligers have already been confirmed as well. So overall in Europe there are no legal hurdles against breeding a male lion with a tigress to produce liger.
In Africa and Australia there are hardly any constraints in breeding a male lion against a female tigress. However; South Africa and Libya are the only countries in Africa which have ligers, while the Canberra Zoo in Australia also has Tigons and ligers as well. So the zoos all around the world except for Taiwan do not face any issues for breeding a male liger with a female tigress.
The breeding program to produce ligers should not face any legal constraints. The theory of the Animal Rights Activists conclude that tigers and lions are endangered animals therefore; this thing should be stopped. However; what we have found is that this breeding program of crossbreeding male lion with tigress takes place within captive big cats. Captive big cats are not subject to any kind of extinction but rather their population has grown 6 times as compared to the big cats in the wild. So imposing legal constraints for breeding lion and tigress to produce liger is just a propaganda and conspiracy and nothing more than it.
Perhaps they need to learn that crossbreeding is totally natural and it takes place 10% within wild animals and 30% within plant species.
