A new report from the conservation and animal welfare campaign group Care for the Wild International (CWI) exposes the truth about the conditions of animals at the Tiger Temple in Kanchanburi (Thailand) have to live.
Tourists visit the Tiger Temple in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi to have their photo taken with these majestic animals for a fee. It is a monastery that has served as a shelter for cubs rescued from poachers since 2003. Yet the temple is very controversial.
Revealing Report on Abuse at Tiger Temple
The animal rights organization CWI is now using the evidence they have to persuade Thailand's National Parks Department to transfer the tigers to a reserve. The Tiger Temple keeps 15 captive tigers for public display and petting. The temple has been a major tourist attraction for many years.
Activists claim that it is not a shelter at all, but pure animal abuse. Employees would hit the tigers. Due to the stress of captivity, the animals suffer from physical and behavioral problems. Animal rights organizations are therefore striving for the tigers to be transferred to a nature reserve.
Truth about the tigers
The temple has always maintained that the tigers kept there have been rescued from poachers, that they are kept in the best possible way, and that they are so tame because of the good treatment and peaceful environment in the temple. But the CWI investigation, which took two years and was secretly spied within the temple walls, details just how much the tigers' welfare is at stake.
The report also shows that there is illegal animal trade, danger to people's safety and misplaced claims for conservation work.
Bad conditions
In the temple, the animals are housed in poor conditions. The employees torment the animals by beating them and spraying urine in their faces – a primitive way of keeping them under control. Only when tourists are willing to pay to be photographed with the tigers are they taken out of their cramped cages.
The CWI report lists a long list of physical and behavioral problems that plague the tigers. They are the result of the stress of imprisonment and the horrible conditions in the temple.
Illegal trade
CWI has also discovered that the temple is involved in the illegal sale of their senior tigers to a tiger farm in Laos.
These are alarming reports and the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) is strongly urging the Thai government to take steps to put an end to this.
Source: Erna van der Ploeg – Nieuwlog.nl
Okay, but what should we do with those tigers? Put it in a cage at the zoo? Put it in a closed reserve and then not feed it? Kill? None of these options seem like a good solution to me.
I think spraying urine in the face is a great solution. If your dog does not want to be potty trained, you must also take it with its nose through the stool, then it will be over in no time.
I think protecting animals is a great goal. However, unsavory practices must first take place against which the animals will be protected. I don't think spraying urine is bad enough to intervene.
Personally, I would have expected the tigers to be kept calm by means of drugs. There's nothing about that in the article, so it probably won't happen. So these tigers live without drugs as tame kitties with the monks. I think that's very clever, even the tiger trainer of the average state circus can't do that.
As a result, I conclude that these tigers are not abused, but also do not live in the ideal living environment. Whether to intervene here is not up to me, but I think that there are much more serious cases of animal abuse to be found in the world.
“If your dog does not want to be potty trained, you also have to pass it through the stool with its nose, then it will be over in no time.”
As a former dog trainer at the Animal Protection, I want to let you know that this solution you mention is absurd. A puppy does not yet have control over its sphincter muscles, just like babies. Do you also smear a baby with his face through the stool?
Peter dogs are not people but animals. Sniffing is a well-known way to train a dog. You don't do that with a very young puppy, but after a few weeks of training on potty training you can apply that and the dog is potty trained.
I don't see the comparison with humans in this and this article was about tigers in Thailand.
They are sprayed with urine to train them and that is why this is called animal abuse on this blog. I don't agree with that because I understand something different by animal abuse.
If you make a problem of this while there are sick or malnourished street dogs running loose on every street corner, then it seems advisable to shift the focus to the street dogs.
Incidentally, I am very much in favor of protecting animals, but to allow these tigers to live in natural conditions, you need a large reserve. The tigers will eat prey every day, so they must be walking around. In Asia, all nature reserves are deforested to grow palm oil or to grow crops, so it seems more sensible to me to counter that.
I didn't know that animal protection has dog trainers, I still learned something.
What you are trying to justify is a very reprehensible, primitive method and has nothing to do with dog training or house training. It's downright nasty and causes a lot of stress for a dog. Talk to someone who really knows about dogs, they will agree.
Spraying Tigers with urine was mentioned, as well as cages that were too small and beating the animals. All of these points are forms of animal cruelty.
By the way, as a non-Christian, I believe that humans are animals too. Just a little more developed. The problem with some people is that they act like animals….
PETER .
Would Piet also have been put through it with his nose in the past.
Hopefully he knows more about insurance.
You will be his child.
Dear Peter.
My late father, shall I say, had dogs all his life and had a natural superiority over dogs.
His voice, without raising his voice, was often enough to make almost any dog calm, at ease, or whatever.
Indeed, a very young puppy with his nose through his own urine or faeces is of little use.
However, if the puppy, or in cats the kitten, can walk well, then this is indeed a very good and very fast-acting learning method.
Wild dogs, wolves, and I thought foxes do that to their young too.
So my father did too.
And I do too.
And I don't feel guilty about that at all.
The whole problem, at least in my view, is that we have humanized pets.
When people try to treat, and attribute human qualities.
Stop it man, dogs are dogs and not people.
And of course there are many so-called experts who say they know everything about dogs, understandably, they make money off people who don't have a dog but a human as a pet.
A dog will always try to boss you around, that's its natural behavior.
And with me, a dog will know who's boss within a few days.
Am I old fashioned?
Think so.
I like animals.
Well and or, often they are better for you as people.
But…..they are animals and not people.
They are indeed very old views, that you have, Hans. Still from the time of black and white TV. Dusty and outdated. At the time, I myself was involved in the introduction of an animal-friendly training method at the Animal Protection in Apeldoorn, now about 10 years ago, such as the clicker method that is now used almost everywhere. It is about rewarding rather than punishing. That works much better and dogs learn faster. They like it. Dolphins are also trained this way. Read more here: http://www.dogweb.nl/gedrag/clickertraining.html
Let's stop now because it's off topic.
Dear Pete. In my opinion you have medieval methods to teach animals something. I also grew up with dogs and have had them myself, but I never used your unfriendly method. If you know as much about animals as you claim, then you also know that animals in general will always try to never foul their own "nest" with urine or faeces. Like a baby in a diaper, a puppy also has to learn that he has to do his business outside the nest. By letting a puppy out more often during the puppy years, it will learn to do its needs outside the nest, so outside for us. If an animal does this at an older age, it is up to you as a human being to discover why an animal does this, which also goes against its own nature. I think fighting with tigers does not suit this country, which is known to expats as friendly and unmaterialistic. Piet assumes that no drugs are used to keep those animals so calm. I have no proof of that either, but I think their way too sleepy behavior betrays that something is being used to keep those animals so passive. It's a predator, remember this, and it will normally attack a human. The fact that these animals behave so passively towards complete strangers makes me suspect the worst.
If your dog doesn't want to be potty trained, you either started learning too late or you're not doing it right. Or just don't get a dog if you can't feel anything.
When grabbing the scruff of the neck, the natural parents do and you can do this too. The animal remains frozen because then there is either danger or doing something that is not desired.
For example, if you want a dog to do it on a sandbank / heap behind the bushes in your garden, you only have to pick it up every time and place it on the sand. Stiff, but will not stop his pee right away, but the penny will drop. Or on the newspaper at the front door and later the step outside.
If you don't have the energy for that then PLEASE don't get a dog for people who think about it.
I contributed to this CWI article several years ago and researched the tiger temple at that time. The conditions under which those tigers (and many other animals such as bears and gibbons) were kept were appalling. That is why we came to the conclusion that the tent should be closed. There was enough money at the temple that came in for the animals (400 visitors times 500 baht each is easily 6 million per month) while the care of (then 87) tigers cost around 800,000 baht per month. So there was enough money "left over" to build better enclosures for the tigers, but the will was not there and that is mainly because a tiger in a bigger and better enclosure becomes "wilder" and therefore no longer behaves as it did over time. easy lets use for the photo parade. So loss of income.
However, what was most annoying about the temple was the illegal trade; tigers that grew too old and could no longer be used for breeding or for the photos were dumped with illegal traders in Laos who were willing to pay 200,000 baht for them. Those tigers disappeared regularly.
The solution for the tiger temple is complex, first of all breeding will have to stop by means of sterilization, so that the problem does not just get bigger and bigger. in 2001 there were 4 tigers and now in 2012 there are 97, all from the same first 4 ancestors, which in itself brings many medical problems due to the inbreeding.
The tigers DNA and photo identification will have to be properly mapped so that illegal trade is ruled out in the future.
Furthermore, the treatment will have to be changed for the remaining tigers, a stop to taking pictures and improving the living conditions. There are several NGOs and companies that want to help fund those better accommodations, but as said before, the money is already there at the temple.
Not insignificant detail; all tigers are officially owned by the government. The DNP confiscated all tigers 8 years ago because they were illegal, but never took them…
we have been to the tyger temple a few times but have not noticed any abuse. okay you are only there for a few hours and do wonder are they getting something they are so calm and can pet. in itself we thought it looked well cared for and is also quite extensive if you had not been there for a while. I don't think it's the intention if you want to protect animals and then abuse them anyway. I don't know in what way they are abused, but just like a previous writer says, a tyger in a zoo is also in a small space that could be some kind of abuse.
I'm here. silent about what this Piet writes about raising dogs. Let's hope he doesn't have one.
Just like Maria, I'm still shocked by the reactions given here regarding articles about animal suffering, in my opinion those kinds of reactions also come from people who like the kinds of occasions such as the Tiger Temple, snakes and crocodile farms, elephants playing soccer and so on. keep it up, keep it up.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself because I've said it here before, but as long as there are people who still enjoy going there without realizing what those animals have to endure, these kinds of "attractions" will continue to exist.
Miek do you think I potty trained dogs by taking their nose through the poop?? I find that funny.
We are talking about Thailand in Asia ... .. much worse things happen there, but you have apparently never seen them by your reaction.
Incidentally, I like to believe that the temple tigers deserve a better life because such animals should not be locked up. However, they are fed and do not look sick, that is not the problem.
And that's still no reason to rub their noses in the shit as a civilized educated person, that civilized educated person knows better than that, otherwise he wouldn't be that civilized educated person. Is it noted?
Comic Pete??? Then we apparently have a different sense of humor…
I was in Kanchanaburi in November 2010 and I got the idea that something was wrong with those Tigers. Every day there was promotion in a restaurant next to the bridge (the famous one) with a few tigers. Who lay there as if dead on a table.
I then (secretly took some pictures of it) the gentlemen supervisors were rather camera shy.
I don't think I can post pictures here, but I will email them to anyone who wants to see them.
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The reason I'm only reading this today is because I'm looking for it. Today there is a piece on thaivisa.com:
Tiger's death accidental: temple vet
The Nation on Sunday
KANCHANABURI: — The veterinarian at the “Tiger Temple” – Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua, in Kanchanaburi's Sai Yok district – said yesterday that the death of a tiger on May 26 resulted from a freak accident, but the temple treated its tigers well and cooperated with Thai authorities.