That photo costs about $17. The premium version, where the tiger’s head rests in your lap, goes for around $140. Selling these poses made Thailand’s Tiger Temple roughly $3 million a year, until police raided it in 2016 and pulled 40 dead tiger cubs out of a freezer.
Thailand has about 1,960 tigers locked in cages right now. Almost all of them are at places that sell tourist photos. The most recent Thai government count of wild tigers came back at 179 to 223. There are eight to ten times more tigers in the photo business than tigers out there hunting deer in the forest.
Police forced their way into the Tiger Temple in May 2016 and walked out with 137 live tigers. They also found 40 frozen cubs in a kitchen freezer. Twenty more cubs were floating in jars of preserving fluid. Authorities stopped a temple staff member trying to drive off the property with two whole tiger pelts, ten tiger fangs, and around 1,500 small good-luck charms made from tiger skin.
Speed breeding is what keeps the supply going. Mothers get their cubs taken at two to three weeks old. The females come back into heat much sooner and pop out another litter long before nature would let them. World Animal Protection investigators walked through Thai tiger parks and found half the cats they saw in cages smaller than a one-car garage. A wild tiger covers 10 to 20 miles in a single night.
Cubs work the photo line for a few months. They get passed from tourist to tourist hundreds of times a day. Most are declawed, which is exactly what it sounds like: amputating part of each toe so they cannot scratch a paying customer. Once a cub grows too big or starts pushing back, it is finished with the photo business and too expensive to feed.
The same animals start a second life as product. In 2007, Thailand signed an international treaty banning the sale of tiger parts. Other tiger countries signed too. Authorities still seized 641 tigers, dead or alive, in smuggling busts across Southeast Asia between 2000 and 2011. DNA tests traced 275 of those straight back to the same kind of farms that sell tourist photos. China and Vietnam are the destination, where the parts are sold as tiger bone wine, tiger skin rugs, and traditional medicine.
After the 2016 raid, the government took custody of all 147 rescued tigers. Eighty-six died within three years. Decades of speed breeding had inbred their bloodlines so badly that their immune systems were already gone by the time anyone tried to save them.
i personally feel like folks (especially women) are blowing their youth trying to psychoanalyze men instead of getting hot and enjoying life. Men don't care about the impact of their own actions, why tf you do??
I am sick and tired of people mocking those who care about the planet. Clean air matters. Living forests matter. Healthy oceans matter. Animals matter. Biodiversity matters. Wanting a livable world for future generations should not be controversial.
A donkey skin sells in Kenya for $130. Boiled into a Chinese beauty product called ejiao, it becomes part of an $8 billion industry. Almost 6 million donkeys are killed every year to feed it. The finished products are sold on Amazon.
Ejiao is a kind of gelatin made by simmering donkey skin for hours. It's mixed into face creams, anti-aging pills, candies, and tonics. Even China's own health regulator has admitted ejiao is just boiled donkey skin. No clinical trials show that it works. But a hit Chinese TV drama called Empress in the Palace put it back in fashion around 2012. The country's growing middle class started taking it for anemia, fatigue, miscarriage, even premature aging.
Donkeys can't reproduce that fast. A female donkey is pregnant for 12 full months and has just one foal at a time. She doesn't start breeding until age two or three. So when Chinese demand exploded, China's own donkey population collapsed from 11 million in 1992 to under 2 million by 2020.
The hunt then went global. Africa has roughly 33 million donkeys, two-thirds of the world's supply. Botswana's donkey population has halved since 2016. In Kenya, government-approved slaughterhouses killed about half the country's donkeys in three years. According to The Donkey Sanctuary, 41% of African donkey owners surveyed had at least one animal stolen.
Donkeys are walked for weeks across borders, denied food and water, until they collapse. They're hit on the head with sledgehammers. Their throats are slit. Some are still breathing when they're skinned. A 2017 PETA investigation in China found foals as young as 5 months old killed this way. Up to one in five donkeys dies before reaching the slaughterhouse.
In February 2024, all 55 African Union countries voted to ban the trade for 15 years across the continent. China is Africa's biggest trading partner. The continent banned this trade anyway. The Donkey Sanctuary still projects demand will hit 6.8 million skins a year by 2027. Within weeks of the ban, donkey theft spiked across Africa. The trade went underground. Chinese companies are now in talks to set up donkey farms in Pakistan instead.
A donkey in rural Africa is often a family's only way to fetch water, carry goods to market, and send kids to school. When it gets stolen overnight, the women and children become the donkey. They walk further with heavier loads. The girls drop out of school first.
The donkey in this photo is leaning against a wall because it's exhausted. The industry on its back is worth $8 billion.
They invented a wheelchair for immobile sperms. From forcing their bodies on ours, men are now forcing their imapired sperms on our eggs but Endometriosis and PCOS remain un cured and under researched.
THEY FOUND A CURE FOR BAD SPERMS BEFORE ENDOMETRIOSIS!!!