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Last Saturday (July 2) police at an intersection in Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand stopped two pickup trucks bound for China via Laos - and found the bodies of three full grown wild Malayan tigers packed in huge ice boxes, plus 150 dead pangolins in fruit crates.

Police arrested the four men with the trucks, who said two people in Narathiwat paid them 15,000 Baht to make the trip.

The seizure was both depressingly routine - hundreds of pangolins are found on the Malaysia-China land route every month - and spectacular because of the presence of the tigers.

It was also a small but indicative fraction of a growing heap of dead tigers which is challenging governments' ability to save the species considered at the heart of Asia's identity.

Over in India, poachers during last year's monsoon season, for a few Dollars wiped out almost three quarters of the entire population of wild tigers in the western state of Rajasthan to supply the Chinese market.

The debacle showed that small scattered populations of tigers in fragmented forests can be killed in a matter of weeks if protection machinery is not in place, does not function well, or does not have political backing.

That was the case in Rajasthan. And there was a fourth factor as well - local communities generally apathetic to wards wildlife conservation, if not downright hostile because they have lost rights to free forest produce.

A worldwide uproar ensued when the losses were discovered some three months ago. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it a national crisis, and set up a wildlife crime unit - something activists had been urging for a decade - and a task force to look into repairing the creaky protection system and devising long term strategies to save tigers and their habitat.

India has somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 wild tigers - by far the biggest population of all Asian countries but in historical terms a small one scattered in disparate groups prone to inbreeding.

Asia has already permanently lost three of its original eight species of tigers. The rest, including those in India, are sliding rapidly towards extinction. The first to go will be the south China tiger, of which there are less than two dozen left in the wild.

Protection in tiger habitats is often on paper, and corruption endemic in many countries where they are found - making them fair game.

A dead tiger can fetch up to US$ 40,000 in China, where the market is growing because of rising affluence. Tiger parts are used for a variety of purposes, even though modern research in China itself has found its properties are not very different from dog and pig bones. The appeal of the tiger is not based in reality, it is in the imagination of the consumer.

The global wildlife market, at around US$ 160 billion annually, is estimated to be the third largest in the world after arms and drugs, yet does not attract as much public attention as the first two.

A furious debate is now under way in the conservation community on how to save Asia's remaining wild tigers.

In the process an old idea has been revived - farming tigers to flood the market with their products, thereby driving prices down and reducing the incentive to poach.

The problem is farming of critically endangered species has never saved them from extinction. For example, crocodiles are farmed in Thailand, but there are hardly any croc odiles left in the wild.

Notes professor G. Agoramoorthy, a primatologist teaching at Taiwan's Taipei University : ''I have seen wild life farms from south America to south east Asia, all somehow directly or indirectly putting pressure on the existing wild populations of endangered species.''

The problem, notes Debbie Banks of London-based Environmental Investigation Aency, which has done extensive and definitive work on tigers, is that traditional Chinese medicine is a global market and the main reason for taking a tiger product is to inherit the animal's properties.

It is clear that if farm tiger products were to be legalised, instead of currently banned worldwide under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a black market would quickly develop for the wild product.

Opening the floodgates of this market would very quickly kill off the last remaining tigers. Conservationists point out that there are just too few tigers around to experiment with risky strategies.

''CITES has explored and rejected tiger farming as a conservation tool on a number of occasions'' Ms Banks says.

Adam Roberts of the US-based Born Free Foundation adds ''China instituted bear farming around 1984 with the argument...that it would reduce pressure on wild popula tions.''

''The exact opposite is true. Bear farms still deplete wild populations to stock their farms. Bears continue to be poached in the wild, not just Asiatic bears but black bears across north America.''

The economics of poaching undermine the logic of free market balances; it takes around US$ 2,000 a year to raise a tiger to adulthood in captivity in passable conditions, while it takes around US$ 5 to have a wild tiger killed. The black market would be hugely more profitable than the farm product market.

Also, farm-bred tigers would not be able to survive if introduced into the wild. Though they are adaptable, they are not American bison; they are highly specialised and largely solitary territorial predators who need to hunt to stay alive.

It is a fact that local communities in countries like India have largely seen wildlife reserves as elitist. Part of the blame lies with conservationists and the tourist industry, who have not been able to make an adequate case out of the fact that wild tigers sustain a huge tourism industry which gives thousands of jobs to locals.

Millions of Dollars have been spent and scores of lives lost in the fight to save the tiger from extinction. Thousands of tourists flock to countries like India only to see tigers. At Thailand's infamous Sri Racha tiger farm, periodically under investigation by the authorities for dodgy tiger deals, thousands of tourists queue up to see bored tigers in cages.

Such is the drawing power of the giant cat. Conservationists say unless governments seriously crack down on the illegal trade in wildlife, and sharpen protection of tiger habitat, the big cats will, in a tragic and irreversible irony, be hunted and eaten to extinction precisely because of their charisma.