N. Korean Tiger Starving for Attention

In Korean lore, a tiger is a sacred guardian of towns, a rival of dragons. Nang-rim, a North Korean tiger, hardly matched her robust mythology on disembarking in South Korea in 1999.

A victim of the food shortages afflicting most North Korean people, Nang-rim was 220 pounds--two-thirds her normal 330-pound weight. Shipped from Pyongyang’s zoo in a wildlife exchange program, she gorged on beef, pork and poultry at South Korea’s main zoo in Gwacheon, on the outskirts of Seoul.

“If she had stayed in Pyongyang, who knows what would have happened?” keeper Han Hyo-dong mused. A few yards away, his ward paced a cage lined with plaster walls of imitation rock.

Now all that Nang-rim lacks--besides freedom--is a mate. Her procreative prospects depend on two nations that have yet to sign a peace treaty formally ending their 1950-53 war.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles contacts with the North, said a company is trying to import a male tiger from North Korea for trysts with 10-year-old Nang-rim.

The firm, Shinheung Synergy, arranged Nang-rim’s Southern transfer, the ministry said. It declined to reveal details about the shadowy company, which is not listed in the telephone directory and does not have a Web site.

The secrecy may derive from fear that publicity will upset reclusive North Korea and derail the tiger project.

Mystery cloaks many other exchanges between the destitute North and the rich South, which funnels fertilizer and other aid northward in an effort to pry open the doors of the totalitarian regime.

A yearlong reconciliation process has ebbed, apparently the victim of friction between North Korea and South Korea’s closest ally, the United States.

The tiger project may have fallen victim to politics: On April 8, a male tiger arrived at South Korea’s Inchon port from North Korea, prompting media reports that it was a North Korean mate for Nang-rim. But the Unification Ministry quoted Shinheung officials as saying the tiger was a South Korean gift that had been rejected because it was too young to mate.

There are no “pure” mating partners for Nang-rim in South Korea, said Hwang Woo-suk, a professor of veterinary science at Seoul National University.

The handful of tigers in the South, all in captivity, are crossbreeds, Hwang said.

The professor, who cloned a cow in 1999, tried to clone Nang-rim last year. He plucked a few cells from her ear, and a lion stood in as a surrogate mother, but the ovum died.

Nang-rim, named after the mountain where she was nabbed in 1993, could live up to a decade more.

Korean tigers, along with North Chinese and Siberian tigers, are the same endangered subspecies: Panthera tigris altaica.

South Koreans revere tigers: The carnivore was the symbol of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. The more creative insist the shape of the Korean peninsula resembles a crouching tiger.

The last tiger seen in the wild in the South was spotted in 1922. In North Korea, most forests have been chopped down by people desperate for cooking or heating fuel.

One Northern area where tigers might exist is Mt. Paektu, on the Chinese border. It is the official birthplace of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and is largely untouched.

In 1998, Dale Miquelle, a Siberian tiger expert with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, contracted survey work at Paektu with North Korea. The results were inconclusive.

“The survey data we got from [North Korea] could not be corroborated, and the pictures they sent of tiger tracks could not be confirmed,” he said. “Therefore, we are just not sure if there are any left there.”