86 Big Cats Rescued From Thailand’s Tiger Temple Have Died in Government Custody
n 2016, Thai authorities removed 147 big cats from the so-called “Tiger Temple,” a notorious tourist attraction long plagued by allegations of abuse and exploitation. Three years later, 86 of these tigers are dead, leaving just 61 survivors still in government care.
Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation announced the tigers’ passing Monday. Per a statement, the animals’ primary cause of death was laryngeal paralysis, a respiratory disease that impairs sufferers’ breathing. Other contributing factors included stress triggered by relocation; immune deficiencies associated with inbreeding; and canine distemper, a virus most commonly seen in domestic dogs.
Speaking with the New York Times’ Ryn Jirenuwat and Richard C. Paddock, Edwin Wiek, founder of the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, says the deaths could have been avoided if the government had taken preventive measures such as increasing the distance between cages.
In an interview with BBC News, the conservationist notes that cramped conditions enabled the spread of disease among the big cats. He further cites the government’s limited budget, which prevented officials from treating those affected by canine distemper. (The virus is easily managed with proper food and supplements, clean water, and space to roam.)
“To be very honest, who would be ready to take in so many tigers at once?” Wiek says. “The authorities should have asked for help from outside, but instead insisted on doing all [the] work themselves.”
The tigers’ one-time temple caretaker, Athithat Srimanee, also refutes the government’s account. “They did not die because of inbreeding,” he tells Reuters’ Panarat Thepgumpanat and Panu Wongcha-um, but because they were housed in inadequately sized cages.
Australian conservation nonprofit Cee4Life exposed conditions at the Tiger Temple, a Buddhist monastery located northwest of Bangkok, in an investigation published in January 2016. As National Geographic’s Sharon Guynup reported in an accompanying exposé, the temple—controversial due to its reputedly poor treatment of captive animals—generated around $3 million in annual income by charging tourists to feed and take pictures with the tigers housed on its grounds.
Government raids conducted in the aftermath of the media firestorm confirmed critics’ long-held suspicions. Authorities searching a truck attempting to leave the compound discovered more than 1,600 tiger parts destined for the illegal wildlife market, as well as 40 deceased tiger cubs stuffed into a freezer.https://dps.instructure.com/eportfolios/120446/Best_Online_Marriage_Lawyer_in_Lahore/Easy_Way_For_Get_The_Services_of_Engagement_and_Online_Marriage_Registration_in_Pakistan
In a statement, Sybelle Foxcroft, cofounder of Cee4Life and leader of the investigation that exposed conditions at the Tiger Temple, attributes the 86 felines’ death largely to their treatment at the compound.
“I wrote publicly about Mek Jnr,” a male tiger exhibiting particularly severe symptoms during a 2015 visit to the site, “and I was just about begging the Tiger Temple to help him, but they ignored it all and said he was fine,” Foxcroft explains. “He was far from fine and he would end up dying in agony from this.”
If operations at the tourist attraction had continued, the activist adds, the 86 felines “would have still died of the same illnesses, but the difference would be that the Tiger Temple would have skinned the dead bodies, and used the body parts for sales.”
According to the Times, the government avoided releasing information on the tigers’ welfare for months. In November, for example, Kanjana Nitaya, director of Thailand’s Wildlife Conservation Office, said several tigers had died but declined to cite a specific number. She maintained that officials were “taking the best care of the tigers we can provide.”
Moving forward, Dina Fine Maron writes for National Geographic, the government will continue caring for the Tiger Temple survivors, ensuring that conditions are safe and designed to reduce stress. It remains unclear whether authorities will move the 61 remaining tigers to a different facility or otherwise change the way in which the animals are managed.
ver the past few days, the internet has unleashed its collective wit on a video of the “salmon cannon,” a gadget that is used to transport migratory fish, primarily salmon, over and around dams blocking their way. While slinging fish upriver using a pneumatic tube is kind of funny, it’s also a legit piece of conservation equipment that may help to restore ecosystems.
The fish frenzy began when a video of the fish cannon—actually a fish migratory system created by the aptly named company Whooshh Innovations—was highlighted on the news platform Cheddar. From there, the video, which shows people loading salmon into the tube and then follows the fish’s journey through the migrator tube up and over a dam, went viral.
The internet did its thing, adding the music from Super Mario Brothers to the scene as well as a crowd favorite: Lady Gaga’s iconic belting in the song Shallow. Lots of people want to take a ride in it.
As Scottie Andrew at CNN reports, the fish cannon is not a new invention, and when it first hit the media in 2014, comedian John Oliver spent almost five minutes riffing on the salmon cannon.
Lady Gaga as a salmon going through the fish tube pic.twitter.com/04HCcB1vNX
— Hngry Mode (@salmattos) August 13, 2019
Aja Romano at Vox reports that the fish tube is as useful to conservation efforts as it is absolutely bonkers. During the 19th and 20th centuries, rampant dam building across the United States blocked the migratory paths of many fish species, in particular salmon that naturally swim upriver to spawn in the rocky pools where they were born. With 85,000 dams in the Unites States alone, that means the natural pathways for a lot of fish have been disrupted, pushing many species—especially native salmon—onto the endangered species list
Once this problem was recognized, scientists began to try to remedy the situation. One solution was to build “fish ladders” into dams, or a series of stepped pools designed to allow the fish to flop their way over dams to their spawning grounds. But recent studies found that the ladders are too hard to navigate, beat up the fish, and only a small fraction of fish actually find and use the ladders. The other option is trapping the fish and hauling them upstream via barges, trucks or sometimes helicopters, an expensive and resource intensive solution that often leaves fish disoriented.
Restocking lake trout in Utah with aircraft, via @utahdwr. pic.twitter.com/4WLDGSeuBh
— Machine Pix (@MachinePix) September 4, 2018
The fish cannon, originally designed to transport fresh fruit in orchards, is still being evaluated by government agencies and conservation groups but so far appears to be a better solution. CNN’s Andrew reports that the fish are placed in the tube where differential pressure pushes them along a flexible tube that expands to accommodate their size. They travel at about 22 miles per hour and get misted by water the entire way. Ideally, the fish don’t have to be fed through the cannon by hand. Instead, the entrance to the tube is camouflaged as habitat attractive to the fish and they will enter the accelerator on their own. When running at full capacity, the machine can fling 50,000 fish upstream every day.
A study of the system conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories published in April in Fisheries Research found that the animals sustained very few injuries from the Whooshh tube and there were only a very small number of problems, like fish getting stuck in the tubes.
“The results of our studies have shown that the system does have potential to assist in migration of salmonids. Future evaluations are still needed to compare the passage success with conventional fishways,” a Whooshh spokesperson tells Vox’s Romano.
So far, reports CNN, Whooshh has sold 20 of their fish cannon systems to government agencies in Europe and the U.S., including one that is almost a quarter-mile long.
“People think it’s crazy,” Whooshh CEO Vince Bryant says. “This is the real deal, guys. This is not some internet video thing.”
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