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Today June 1 2016, grim discovery came as Thai authorities, working alongside the Wildlife Friends Foundation, raided the temple to vacate all its live animals following allegations of animal cruelty.
The Buddhist temple, at Kanchanaburi, in west of Bangkok, is a famous tourist site, with thousands visitors per year and taking pictures with a tiger. But animal foundation have called for years for the temple to be shut down.
Along with the cubs a bear and a binturong (a vulnerable type of bearcat), were also discovered inside the freezer, along with the unidentified animal body.
“These were un registered animals with the authorities and no one knows how they met this grizzly [sic] end,” the WFFT mentioned in a statement on its FB page.
The group, which has campaigned for long years for the tourist attraction and now asked to be closed before, but now it called again for a total shutdown.
Tom Taylor, who is the assistant director of the WFFT, said to the group “wasn’t surprised” at the discovery of the bodies.
“There were lot of controversy around the temple,” he reported to the News Agency. Taylor said he made a grateful efforts, to remove the animals from the temple
Adisorn Nuchdamrong, deputy director general of the DNP, said the cubs were found in the kitchen area of the temple.
He confirmed authorities were working on to remove the other 87 tigers which is alive. The temple, officially known as Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno, has closed for tourism.
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.
Most recently, a Nat Geo investigation claimed to have found proof that the temple authorities was illegally trading live animals as well as tigers.
The temple authorities has denied that. Now the team's only concerns about the survival of the alive tiger. In the past years the animal’s numbers have fallen because of deforestation, trafficking, and poaching. Before a century years roughly 100,000 tigers are roamed in about 30 Asian countries — today that numbers placed at 3,200 in just 11 countries.
Reference News Article - Nat Geo, Buzz Feed & Reuters
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