For years leading up to the big cats’ removal from the Buddhist temple, formally known as Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno, that facility had served as a popular tourism attraction where visitors took selfies with the tigers and bottle-fed cubs. Yet a National Geographic expose and work by the Australian conservation nonprofit Cee4Life revealed controversial practices, including alleged animal abuse and speed breeding of the big cats to supply tiger body parts for illegal trade.

Such reports heightened public pressure to shut down the facility even as hundreds of so-called “tiger farms” have sprung up across Southeast Asia. In 2016, the tigers—a mix of species and subspecies—were confiscated from the Tiger Temple, located about 100 miles west of