Image: Environmental Investigation Agency/Facebook
Wildlife officials found forty dead tiger cubs in a freezer during a raid at a Buddhist temple in Thailand.
The operation that began earlier this week is an effort to remove all living tigers from the temple after repeated allegations of wildlife trafficking and abuse. The tiger cubs were an incidental find.
Image: Annamiticus/Facebook
The cubs were reported to be only one to two days old when they died, and a spokesperson from the Thailand Department of National Parks said that the cubs “must be of some value for the temple, but for what is beyond me.”
Image: Tiger Extinction Awareness/Facebook
The temple responded by saying that they kept deceased cubs instead of cremating them, as their previous Veterinarian changed the policy in 2010. It is presumed that the Vet wanted to keep them to “combat the allegations of the temple selling the cubs,” according to the temple’s Facebook page.
Accompanying the tiger cubs were deer horns, a dead bearcat, animal intestines in various containers, and the skull of a bull. In Asia, tigers are one of the hundreds of animals poached to fuel the demand for bones and body parts that are used in traditional medicine.
Tigers at the temple were chained to the ground, and many visitors reported that they appeared to be sedated.
A total of 147 tigers will be relocated to new homes at two governmental breeding centers this week. Because they have been hand-raised in captivity, the consensus is that they would not survive in the wild.
The temple was a popular tourist destination, but is now closed to the public.
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