When Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Jungle Book” at the turn of the 20th century, about 100,000 wild tigers roamed the Asian continent. Today, perhaps 3,200 remain scattered across 13 countries, wiped out by trophy hunts in India, the 1960s fashion craze for fur in the United States and Europe, disappearing habitat, conflict with people and poaching.

Tigers command a small fortune on the black market, and demand is rising. A loophole in the country’s wildlife protection law allows the breeding and “utilization” of certain products derived from captive-bred endangered species. This has made industrial-scale “tiger farming” big business. The number of captive tigers skyrocketed from about 85 in 1993 to 5,000-plus today. (Vietnam, Laos and Thailand also breed tigers, but on a much smaller scale.) Farming continues despite a 2007 decision by the convention that “tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivatives.”

In 2010, the Chinese Year of the Tiger, the bleak conditions in China’s commercial breeding facilities came under scrutiny from conservation groups and the media. Gruesome images documented tigers crammed into cramped, decrepit, concrete enclosures. Many were emaciated, reduced to striped bags of bones. Some were deformed by inbreeding.

Little seems to have changed since then.

Some farms are run as animal parks, where the few healthy animals perform before cheering tourists. The rest are hidden from public view. Though these parks are thinly disguised as educational or conservation initiatives, they in no way help the species. A captive tiger has never been successfully released into the wild.

The two largest breeding outfits (which more than 1,000 tigers each) were begun with start-up financing from the State Forestry Administration, an agency with contradictory roles: protecting wildlife while also overseeing and promoting intensive tiger farming.

While breeding is legal in China, the sale of tiger parts is not. Skins from captive animals are exempt if they have forestry administration permits, supposedly issued for educational or scientific purposes.

But undercover operatives working for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based group focused on exposing environmental crime, found the licensing process rife with improprieties.