Thai police have charged 22 people, including three Buddhist monks, with wildlife trafficking as they continued to remove more dead animals, including a bear and a leopard, from the infamous Tiger Temple, authorities said on Friday.
The temple in Kanchanaburi has been a major tourist attraction for more than two decades, with visitors paying THB600 admission to pose for photographs with the tigers.
Wildlife activists have accused the temple of illegally breeding the tigers while some visitors on online forums complained that the tigers appeared sedated.
The temple denies the accusations.
Adisorn Nuchdamrong, from Thailand’s Department of National Parks, said that 22 people have been charged with wildlife possession and trafficking, including 17 members of the temple’s foundation and three monks trying to flee with a truckload of tiger skins.
All of this follows a grim discovery last Wednesday, when the bodies of 40 tigers cubs were found inside a freezer.
It remains unclear why the dead tiger cubs were being stored, though tiger bones and body parts are used in traditional Chinese medicine.
“We’ve confiscated all the hard disks of closed circuit cameras in this temple for police to find evidence of wrongdoing,” Adisorn said.
The temple officially opened in 1994 close to a wild tiger habitat. It received its first tiger cub, which had been found by villagers, in 1999.
The cub died soon after but villagers kept bringing cubs to the temple, usually when the mothers had been killed by poachers, the temple said.
Repeated efforts to shut down the temple over the years have been blocked by the monks. Thailand is a well-known trafficking hub of illicit wildlife products, including ivory.
Thailand’s wildlife department began raiding the temple a week ago. The final of the 137 tigers that lived at the temple were removed on Saturday and settled into the Khao Pratap Chang and Khao Son wildlife breeding centres in Chom Bueng district of Ratchaburi, according to Thai PBS.
The World Wildlife Fund said in April that the number of wild tigers in the world stands at around 3,890. More than 100 wild tigers live in Thailand, though that number could rise as the DNP is discussing possibly eventually releasing some the Tiger Temple’s native tigers back into the wild.
The Bengal Tigers they had at the temple can’t be released into the wild in Thailand since they are not likely able to hunt for themselves in a non-native habitat. They are native to India and Bangladesh.
Story: Reuters/ Thai PBS
Reader Interactions