Warning: Graphic photo below
BANGKOK (AP) — Forty dead tiger cubs were found Wednesday in a freezer at a Buddhist temple that operated as an admission-charging zoo, a national parks official said.
The discovery happened while authorities were removing mostly full-grown live tigers from the temple in western Kanchanaburi province following accusations that monks were involved in illegal breeding and trafficking of the animals.
The cubs were found in a freezer where the temple staff kept food, said Anusorn Noochdumrong, an official from the Department of National Parks who has been overseeing the transfer of the temple’s 137 tigers to shelters. Since Monday, 60 have been tranquilized and removed.
“We don’t know why the temple decided to keep these cubs in the freezer,” Anusorn said. “We will collect these carcasses for DNA analysis.”
(Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation via AP)
The cubs appeared to be up to a week old, he said. Authorities plan to file charges against the temple for illegally possessing endangered species, he said.
The temple’s Facebook page said in March that the temple’s former vet had decided in 2010 to stop cremating cubs that died soon after birth. Calls to the temple’s office were not answered.
The temple, a popular tourist attraction, has been criticized by animal rights activists because of allegations it is not properly set up to care for the animals and flouted regulations restricting the trade of tigers.
The monks resisted previous efforts to take away the tigers, but relented this week after police obtained a court order.
The temple recently made arrangements to operate as a zoo, but the plan fell through when the government determined that the operators failed to secure sufficient resources.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The trade in exotic endangered animals is loathsome. There only are around 5000 tigers left in the world. Counting the dead cubs, this so called “temple” had over 3% of them.
how about we let nature take care of this situation leave these monks in cages or better yet in the wild with these tigers they had and see what happens …someone or thing is going to have a really good meal… may even get a bit of exorcise runnin down that meal
Every once in a while, even with Politics floating around in its miasmic ways, there are stories that make you both sick at heart, and sick to your stomach. This is one of them.
When you stop and think about forty tigers, the story is sickening enough. But when you stop and consider that 40 tigers is an uncomfortable fraction of all the tigers in the wild world wide, the story takes on an even more numbing aspect.
I’ve lived in the Far East. I know the myths and the folk tails that surround tigers and parts of tigers. It has been that way for uncounted centuries, even when the civilizations of the East were the only ones keeping the light of learning alive while the West knew only darkness and brutality.
No one, East Or West, is more supportive and encouraging of religious freedoms than I. In my younger days, I was also Buddhist. But atrocities like this must be ended. There is no more a Buddhist reason for this than there is support in the Quran for car bombs parked in crowded open air markets. Humanity along with faith cries out that all life is sacred.
If that be so, then this sacrilege touches all of us, who have the power to do something about it, but sit idle in the face of the greed and corruption that took these Tigers, and may yet take the entire spices, away from all of us. There is no faith in Extinction.
A friend of ours was working at a small exotic cat place in southern CA, and he told us that every time one of the cats died, the owner put it in a freezer. I never did find out why…