72 tigers die in virus outbreak at Thailand tourist tiger parks

Dozens of tigers have died at Thai “tiger kingdom” style attractions after an outbreak of a feline virus swept through facilities built to let tourists take selfies with apex predators.

According to The Independent, Thai authorities are trying to contain the outbreak after 72 tigers died across tourist parks. The report describes the virus as a deadly feline pathogen and says officials have moved into outbreak-control mode, with containment measures aimed at preventing spread between facilities.

The episode shows that “exotic animal tourism” is industrial animal husbandry with better branding. These parks concentrate large numbers of genetically similar big cats in close quarters, with constant human traffic and frequent animal-to-animal contact—conditions that reliably turn pathogens into scalable products. Biosecurity, when it exists, arrives as an afterthought: a press release, a cordon, and a scramble for disinfectant after the mortality curve has already done its work.

For the visitor, the experience is marketed as controlled danger—proof that humans can domesticate the wild with a handler’s hook and a photo package. For the animals, it is a high-throughput system that optimizes for visibility and compliance, not resilience. When disease enters that system, the logic of the operation becomes brutally clear: a tiger is less a creature than a unit of inventory, and an outbreak is a supply-chain shock.

Thailand’s tourism economy has long monetized wildlife proximity, from elephant rides to predator petting. The cost is not merely ethical abstraction; it is biological risk. Each interaction adds potential transmission routes: staff moving between enclosures, shared tools, shared water, shared surfaces, and the steady churn of visitors. In a world where zoonotic spillovers have already rewritten global policy, it is striking how many businesses still treat infection control as optional until it becomes unavoidable.

The Independent report does not suggest the virus poses a major risk to humans, but that is not the point. Even when a pathogen stays within species, mass mortality is the predictable outcome of keeping wild animals in dense, stressful environments for entertainment.

If the state’s response is more regulation, more inspections, and more licensing, it will likely end in the usual equilibrium: compliance theater for large operators and barriers to entry for smaller ones, while demand for “close encounters” continues. A different outcome would require ending the public and commercial incentives that keep the model viable, rather than treating a tiger assembly line as safe because the tickets say ‘family attraction.’