Thai authorities, working alongside the Wildlife Friends Foundation, raided the temple to remove all its live animals following allegations of animal cruelty.
The Buddhist temple, in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok, is a tourist favorite, with thousands visiting every year and snapping a picture with a tiger. But animal charities have called for years for the temple to be shut down.
“These animals were never registered with the authorities and who knows how they met this grizzly [sic] end,” the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand (WFFT) said in a statement on its Facebook page.
The group, which has campaigned for years for the tourist attraction to be closed, called again for a total shutdown to end the “hideous” practices of the temple.
Tom Taylor, assistant director of the WFFT, said his group “wasn’t surprised” at the discovery of the bodies.
“There has been a lot of controversy around the temple,” he told BuzzFeed News. Taylor said he was hugely grateful to the efforts of the provincial police force, as well as the Department of National Parks (DNP), which was working on removing the animals from the facility.
“We have been campaigning for years and it had seemed like an endless battle,” he said. “We are flabbergasted that it is finally happening and the temple is being brought to justice.”
“They must be of some value for the temple to keep them,” he told Reuters. “But for what is beyond me.”
He confirmed authorities were working to remove the temple’s remaining 87 live tigers, having already confiscated 52 from the site. The temple, officially known as Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno, has remained closed to tourists.
On the temple’s official Facebook page, temple officials denied claims the live animals were being removed on grounds of animal cruelty, instead alleging that many of the injuries seen in videos shown by the DWP of the tigers removed so far were the result of the department’s own mishandling.
Taylor said the confiscated tigers would be rehoused in two wildlife centers, elsewhere in Thailand. They would not be released to the wild, because as they been bred and reared in captivity they were unlikely to survive.
Local news channel Khaosad reported that authorities found the temple’s gates locked shut and the monks resistant to their efforts on the first day of a now three-day operation.
Eventually authorities presented the temple’s guardians with a court order and were allowed onto the premises.
Most recently, a National Geographic investigation claimed to have found evidence the temple was illegally trading live tigers.
The investigation built upon a report by Australian nonprofit, Cee4life (Conservation and Environmental Education for Life), that appeared to demonstrate that the temple broke both Thai law and CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), which governs the breeding and transfer of tigers. The report was handed to Thai authorities earlier this year.
It comes at a time when conservationists are increasingly concerned about the survival of the wild tiger. In the past century the animal’s numbers have been decimated through a combination of deforestation, trafficking, and poaching. A hundred years ago roughly 100,000 big cats are thought to have roamed through 30 Asian countries — today that number is optimistically placed at 3,200 in just 11 countries.
