Sriracha Tiger Zoo


The Sriracha Tiger Zoo is a zoo in Sri Racha, a city on the outskirts of Pattaya, a seaside city in Chonburi Province, Thailand. It is about from Bangkok. The zoo claims a population of 200 tigers and around 10,000 crocodiles, the largest such populations in the world. Admission in 2009 was THB350 for foreigners and THB120 for Thais.

Internet meme

Photographs of a female tiger nursing piglets wrapped in tiger skin, accompanied by a fictitious story about a zoo in California, were actually taken at Sriracha.

Controversy

The Animal Welfare Institute reported in 2004 that the zoo had been using tigers and elephants in circus shows, including tigers leaping through rings of fire, walking across a double tightrope, parading around a ring on hind legs, and riding on horseback. AWI reported "potentially dangerous human-tiger and human-elephant close interaction", "bizarre multi-species enclosures", tigers being struck with steel poles by trainers and implications that tigers were being bred for export to China.
World Animal Protection reported in 2016 that the tigers 'appeared in the poorest condition of all those observed in our research.'