Tourism and social media have played a vicious role in fuelling animal abuse across many countries, and Thailand has come under the radar multiple times.?
The abuse meted out to wild animals in unspeakable. According to a new investigation carried out by PETA, elephants - including babies - are tethered by extremely short chains.
YouTube/PETA
A disturbing footage reveals handlers jabbing the animals with sharp metal spikes to force them into giving rides and performing tricks, leaving them with bleeding wounds. At Samutprakarn, PETA found elephants swaying back and forth, a symptom of psychological distress, because they are forcefully cut off from the rest of the herd.?
The Thai elephant industry is notorious for the phajaan ritual, in which still-nursing baby elephants are dragged away from their mothers, immobilised, beaten mercilessly, and gouged with nails for days at a time.
For facilities like Samutprakarn, traffickers often kill the parent animals in order to catch the young.
Other animals are being used as photo props. When not being used for photos, primates, tigers and lions are held in cramped cages.
Every time a tourist pays for a selfie with a performing elephant or wide-eyed tiger cub, they are unknowingly fuelling poaching and hunting of these precious creatures.
"The animals at this Thai zoo see nothing but concrete, chains, and cages,¡± says PETA Vice President of International Campaigns, Jason Baker.
¡°PETA is calling on travellers around the world to stay away from any facility that sentences wild animals to a miserable life of violence and deprivation.¡±
Just last month, the?National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, levied criminal charges on a South African lion breeding farm after 108 lions were found in squalid conditions.?
The lions, tigers and leopards were being bred for the export market in the farm named Pienika.
The cubs ripped from their mothers at just a few days old, are hand-reared by paying volunteers and they are ultimately used as mere props for tourists. The animals in this shelter were found living in small enclosures with inadequate shelter, no provision of water, overcrowding, and filthy and parasitic conditions.?
Human beings were supposed to be more sensitive than the other species on the planet. Clearly, we've failed. It is not okay, that for our pleasure, a few pictures and fame on social media, we subject animals to unspeakable cruelty.