More Tigers

So we showed up at Tiger Wat bright and early the next morning. They had us "make merit" with the monks (donate food) and then they brought us up to the temple for breakfast. We get there, and all the volunteers are sitting in a circle with the tiger cubs running around playing. So we sat down and immediately, one of the cubs come over to me and starts chewing on my pants!

We got it off of my pants & it moved right to my purse!

They were a lot of fun to play with!

Here's Tina.

After we ate, it was time to feed the tigers!

Then it was time to take them for a walk down to the canyon so they could play.

We each took a tiger (with a trainer of course). Here's my tiger.

And Tina.

And her mom.

We took them down to the canyon so that they could play in the water. We had to form a line to "block" the tigers from running out of the canyon. There was NOTHING between us & the tigers & I have to tell you, if you of those guys really wanted to get by, I'm not going to stop them! Here's video of the playing. (We took the younger tigers first & then did it again with the older tigers). Here you can see that there's nothing between them & us.

And here they were playing right at our feet.

And here they're really playing!

After playtime, we had to give them a bath (I don't have the pics for this right now, but I'll get them up as soon as I get them).

12:30 rolled around & they opened it up to other visitors and we took that time to do a little exploring. We found a momma tiger that had just given birth 11 days ago!

There were a lot of other animals on the grounds. Here's a very friendly deer!

It was a pretty awesome experience. And as for the speculation that they drug the tigers, I really can't say one way or the other. The staff at the temple say that big cats sleep during the hottest part of the day to conserve their energy for hunting (even your cats at home spend a big portion of their time sleeping). They also say that drugging the tigers everyday would be physically impossible as the tigers would develop a resistance to the drug & you would have to keep giving them more & more until they eventually die. It makes sense, but then I'm not a vet. If you want to learn more about Tiger Wat, you can visit their website at: www.tigertemple.org.