Tiger’s Guardian – Thailand

Founded in 1994, Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua is a forest temple and sanctuary housing numerous wild animals, tigers among them. The Theravada Buddhist temple is located in the Saiyok district of Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province not far from the border of Myanmar.
Local villagers arrived to the gate of the Wat with an abandoned tiger cub in 1999. Unable to turn away any sentient being, the monks took the animal in and weaned it back to health. More tigers were brought to the temple over the years, typically orphans of mothers killed by poachers or tigers who had become a threat to villages. More than twenty-one cubs had been born at the Tiger Temple by 2007 and now there are nearly fifty tigers in the sanctuary.
The great cats are fed large quantities of boiled chicken to prevent primal instincts in the cat at the the smell of blood. There are more cubs born in a single litter at the Wat than at any zoo in the world due to the respect and reverence the tigers receive from the monks and abbot. This image was made of the head Abbott and his favorite cat.