Daily Times

When Thai park rangers raided a popular zoo famous for letting visitors feed and handle tigers, they found 1,600 tiger parts, including pelts, amulets fashioned from skins, scores of teeth, 40 dead cubs in a freezer and 20 more preserved in jars.

Behind the label of the Tiger Temple, a zoo run by Buddhist monks was a business profiting from the illegal trade in tiger parts. The authorities arrested three monks while trying to escape and took 147 tigers into a government-run facility in a highly publicized spectacle.

Coupled with, the raids were worth mentioning attempts for Thailand in its effort to crack down on animal abuse and the illegal trade in tigers and tiger parts. But since then, the plight of Thailand’s captive tigers has only worsened.

Notably, officials admitted last week that 86 of the seized temple tigers had died in their care, many from stress-related causes. No one from the Tiger Temple ever went to jail for possessing tiger parts or for operating the lucrative unlicensed zoo.

However, animal welfare activists have long urged the government to shutter those tiger zoos that are little more than farms producing animals for the black market.

“The whole system of animal welfare needs to be upgraded in Thailand,” said Tanya Erzinclioglu, who cared for tigers at the Tiger Temple before becoming an animal welfare activist. “They need proper zoo standards. Everyone would have to upgrade, including the Department of National Parks.”

In brief, she established a nonprofit group, for Tigers, to help raise funds. Also, she added that nearly 60 per cent of the zoos had no fresh water for the tigers, she found, and fewer than 20 per cent provided spacious enclosures where the animals could move around without restraint or interference from humans.