Locked in a Cage with a Tiger - Tiger Kingdom Phuket, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Nestled within Chiang Mai and Phuket,Thailand is a place known for allowing tourists to get up close and personal with tigers. On this episode we uncover this unusual place.

Tiger Kingdom is a business in thailand that sells people, usually tourists, the opportunity to get into a cage with a tiger. Now this sounds crazy and well… it is. Getting into a locked steel enclosure with a wild animal, that has the ability to rip to you to pieces in seconds, is what they are selling. This rush, this exhilarating isn’t offered with every cage though. As the price goes up, the age of the tiger goes down. This makes sense though, from a business point of view as the average person doesn’t want to be hanging around with an adult tiger in a cage, actually make that 4 or 5 tigers as most enclosures don’t have just 1. For around $28 you can walk in, say hello and chill with 5 full grown tigers for 5 minutes. Hanging out with a baby tiger though will run you around $70. The cuteness really pays the bills at tiger kingdom.

How did this madness start, you might ask? The owner of Tiger Kingdom created it when he was given a baby tiger over 30 years ago. A villager found the mother had been killed leaving this baby tiger with no one. The villager knew, the now owner of Tiger Kingdom, had the land and money to raise the tiger.

Tiger Kingdom started out nobally as a tiger rescue sanctuary but as time went on, money needed to be raised to keep the program going. They started allowing guests to come visit the tigers but it was more like a zoo at first.

Things changed though when an Australian couple asked if they could go in the cage and get close to the tigers like the trainers do. Things went downhill after that as more and more tigers were being bred solely for the enjoyment of tourists, basically tiger selfies.

Tigers roam 10 - 20 miles or 16 - 32 km per night in the wild. The tigers at tiger kingdom are trapped in their cages 24/7 which often leads to psychosis as their needs are not being met. Tigers are trained since birth that misbehaving is met with a strike to the nose with a bamboo stick. As you can see here this large disgruntled tiger has a gash on his nose which makes you wonder how hard someone has to hit a tiger in the face with a stick to cause that kind of damage. While in the cage with one of the trainers they’ll be constantly waving and smacking their bamboo stick to let the tigers know if they do anything sudden they’ll be punished.

Staff will guide you throughout the pen then command a tiger to lay on a table so you can take a selfie with it. They give you specific instructions where to walk, where to sit and how to pet the tiger. Petting a tiger has to be done with a lot of force, digging your nails in to simulate what it would feel like having another tiger doing the grooming. The staff are clear about this because if you don’t scratch the tiger’s back hard enough they might think it’s a bug or critter and snap his or her head back and bite your hand off.

While feeling sick to my stomach financially contributing to this place I felt it was necessary to not only get footage but to get a first hand experience of what goes on in there. The baby tigers looked like they were have the times of their lives playing with tourist after tourist but the emotional state of the other 2 groups and adolescent and adult tigers surprised me. The adult tigers seems generally pissed off, depressed and emotionally shattered almost like they were angry but had given up their fight for freedom but the adolescent tigers were 1 of 2 things. 1 they looked heavily drugged and zonked out, I have no proof of this, that’s what it looked like to me, the other group were infuriated with being enslaved and were in a fit of rage trying to escape. Simply walking past these tigers would cause them to pounce, growl and rip and pull at the cage begging for freedom.

Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1wAuezVTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abSdVJnCn7I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUCs6_r8aS0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I_KIEYY-2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEA6VCNWrqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy7XzsSKhS8

Music:
Whitesand - Apocalypse
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe96JG5gdgSRtmqStx0isXA

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Intro music thanks to Machinmasound:
Rallying the Defense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruPk4RD19Nw

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