Knight pressed inside the dark building and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of ammonia. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, what he saw inside was far beyond any inner circle of hell he could have imagined. Fully grown bears were splayed in “crush cages” with wooden slats inserted in the bars to prevent the bears from standing up. Catheters had been attached to their abdomens to drain them like maple trees, and the open wounds where the catheters piped directly into their gallbladders were dusted with antibiotics to prevent infection. As Knight later confirmed, the bear would live its entire life, which could be twenty years, in this position. Sick at his stomach, Knight turned to see a Laotian man trying to pin down a recently captured black bear cub that cried as it paced and lunged wildly against the bars of its cage. The worker jammed a pole through the bars, hobbling the bear cub onto its belly as it screeched in fear. Knight felt tears welling up in his eyes, but his concern soon returned to his own well-being as the worker spotted him and proceeded to chase him out, swinging a rusty shovel at him as he fled outside.

At each stop along his journey, Knight gathered samples for DNA analysis, which he would send to Lara in South Africa. Though some of the samples turned out to be African lions that vendors were trying to pass off as tiger bones and teeth, most of the product he tested was genuine tiger. The portrait the genes painted was stunning, with individual farmed tigers whose lineage could be traced back to wild populations all over the Asian continent, many of which had been driven to extinction.

The Asian demand for all things tiger was striking. There was tiger bone jewelry, tiger skin rugs, tiger skulls, tiger meat, tiger teeth, and every manner of tiger wine. Knight even encountered rice wine with a severed tiger penis floating in it. The hooch tasted conspicuously like the other tiger-part wines he would get shit-faced on while building rapport with the locals.

During one of those research benders, a slurring local had regaled Knight’s translator with a story about how he might be able to procure the most expensive type of tiger part that existed: pink tiger bones. It was the first time the animal expert had ever heard of pink tiger bones—or pink bones of any sort, for that matter. When Knight inquired further, the man described the process for making them pink, which involved sedating the tiger, then skinning and deboning it alive so that the heart still pumped blood as the bones were harvested. Knight declined the offer, doing his best to hide his disgust at the gruesome practice.