Tigers Rescued From Tiger Temple Tourist Attraction Die From Viral Infection Due To Inbreeding

Back in 2016, the Thai authorities confiscated nearly 150 tigers from a shady Tiger Temple tourist attraction, which was investigated for suspected links to wildlife trafficking and animal abuse.

And suffice it to say; animal activists were absolutely stoked. Despite promoting itself as a wildlife sanctuary, the temple has been accused of illegally breeding tigers and even drugging them.

Two things that wouldn’t really tick any boxes over at PETA, in all honesty.

And so, the animals were saved from some serial breeders garbed in holy attires, and the critters all lived happily ever after. The end.

Best ending ever.

Tigers Rescued From Tiger Temple Tourist Attraction Die From Viral Infection Due To Inbreeding

Or at least, that ending’s what I would’ve coined up in my upcoming novel ‘A Journey Through Writing And How My Editors Tahan My Nonsense’, but the fact remains that reality’s quite a different thing from fiction…

Really different actually.

According to media reports, more than half of the tigers have passed away from a viral disease because their immune systems were supposedly weakened by inbreeding.

(Lest you’re unaware, inbreeding’s basically incest, in the sense that your brother’s your dad and your mum’s technically your sister. Yeah, something like that.)

And apparently, the signs started showing soon after they were confiscated. The confiscated animals were previously fetched to two state-run sanctuaries, but it soon became obvious that they were vulnerable to canine distemper virus.

“When we took the tigers in, we noted that they had no immune system due to inbreeding,” the department’s deputy director-general, Mr Prakit Vongsrivattanakul, told the broadcaster MCOT on the weekend.

“We treated them as symptoms came up,” Mr Prakit said.

And while Mr Prakit neglected to offer a rough figure for the number of tigers that had died, public service broadcaster Thai PBS has reported that the toll was 86 of the 147 rescued animals.

Fingers crossed that the remaining 61 tigers will be able to make it through this ordeal.

A Tourist Destination

Before the Thai authorities’ timely intervention, the Tiger Temple tourist attraction had been famous as a tourist destination, where visitors were allowed to take selfies with tigers and bottle-fed cubs.

After global pressure over wildlife trafficking began to sink in, however, the Thai authorities were forced to confiscate more than half of the tigers from the temple. According to Wikipedia, frozen bodies of 40 cubs were found on the premises, with some of them having been dead for more than five years.

The Tiger Temple was forcibly shut down after the raid, but it will reportedly open again under a new moniker ‘Golden Tiger (Thailand) Co Ltd’.