31 Aug 2016

The dark side of tiger tourism

From Nine To Noon, 11:27 am on 31 August 2016

A study of Thailand's rapidly expanding 'tiger tourism' has found that its growth is fuelling the cruel treatment of tigers for the entertainment of visitors.

World Animal Protection has results from a study which shows that there has been a 33 percent rise in the number of captive tigers.

Parks where tourists can feed baby tigers and get photographed with tigers have been in the spotlight recently.

In June a raid at the Tiger Temple found 137 tigers, 40 tiger cub bodies in a freezer, 30 cubs preserved in jars and about 1000 tiger skin amulets or talismans. The Tiger Temple remains closed.

The study has found young tigers are getting stressed and injured by being handled hundreds of times a day by tourists and punished when they don't 'behave'.

Tigers up to the age of three or four are mainly used in these venues.

The study was carried out by Jan Schmidt-Burbach, a wildlife veterinarian and advisor to the charity, who's looked into how tiger tourism works.

The business is booming with 30 million tourists visiting Thailand every year and every fourth tourist wanting their picture taken with a tiger.

So it’s a lucrative business and one with little transparency when it comes to animal welfare, he says.

“These tigers are being kept in severely inadequate conditions they are really suffering on a daily basis and are being exposed to very cruel practices,” Schmidt-Burbach says.

These tourist shows involve tigers jumping through flaming hoops and being prodded into a reaction with a bar when people pose with them for selfies, he says.

World Animal Protection has been monitoring the industry since 2010 and has seen a 30 percent increase in what it calls ‘wildlife entertainment’.

It has called for ban on all tiger breeding for the industry.

“The worrying thing for us, is this industry relies on a steady increase of young tigers; mostly it’s young tigers being used only for first 2 or 3 years.

“So why pay for the upkeep of older tigers for next ten years, doesn’t really make sense. So we are really asking questions what happens with all the adult tigers these venues are accumulating?”