SHOULD TIGERS BE A CASH CROP?

By FRANK GIBNEY JR., IN CHONBURI

Welcome to the World's Largest Tiger Farm,'' says the green-and-blue sign outside Somphong Temsiriphong's new zoo. The Sriracha Farm Zoo and Resort Co. is certainly a breed apart. Down a country road 2 1/2 hours from the roar of Bangkok traffic, the private reserve is home to an eclectic collection of wallabies, deer, camels and 20,000 Asian crocodiles. But the budding zookeeper's pride--and the source of considerable controversy among conservationists around the world--is his menagerie of 35 hybrid Asian tigers. ``Some of these animals are becoming extinct, and I want to have a place where people can enjoy them,'' Somphong recently explained between bites of crocodile steak at the zoo's restaurant.

Building up the population of one of the world's most endangered species would seem to be a proper and magnanimous gesture, but conservationists are outraged by what they suspect is Somphong's long-term goal: to harvest and sell tiger penises and other body parts that bring high prices in Asia. Scientific evidence to the contrary, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine insist that crushed tiger bones and tiger genitalia can cure everything from arthritis to impotence. By most estimates, only about 5,000 tigers are left in the wild, largely because of the price they bring poachers. Despite an international prohibition against the trade, a whole tiger can fetch more than $10,000 on the black market in China and Southeast Asia.

A pig farmer for 18 years, Somphong got into the business of raising tigers after buying four of them from the Chiang Mai Zoo in 1990. Since then he has bred the females twice a year. He admits that his long-term goal is to persuade Thai authorities to allow him to breed tigers and sell their parts, after they die naturally, to medicine makers. A traditional-medicine specialist from Xian, China, is already seeing patients at the farm, which doubles as a clinic. So far, the Thai authorities are dead set against raising tigers for medical use. ``They hope we will permit commercial breeding,'' says a Royal Thai Forestry Department official. ``It will never be allowed.'' Still, proprietors of at least two other crocodile farms in Thailand have also purchased tigers with the intent to breed.

Meanwhile, the Sriracha Farm Zoo and Resort Co. keeps expanding. Somphong hopes to earn millions of dollars from legal trade in crocodile skins and crocodile meat, which he claims is the best to be found in Thailand. He wants his tiger population to swell to 200 within a couple of years, and has opened a petting area for tiger cubs, which at three months old cuddle like house cats. The nagging question, says Leonie Vejjajiva, a founder of the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand, is whether a petting zoo--the feeding costs alone come to $8 a day per animal--and 20,000 crocodiles will generate the kind of money Somphong needs to turn a profit. The suspicion--open or unspoken--is that some of his tigers will wind up as balms and lotions in medicine chests.