An Australian is recovering in a Thai hospital after being mauled by a young male tiger in a special tourist enclosure at an animal park on the resort island of Phuket.

https://youtu.be/9q9hFlzbWMs

Paul Goudie, from Werribee, near Melbourne, was attacked at the enclosure this week at the Tiger Kingdom tourist show after being given controlled access to a group of young tigers.

Goudie, 49, suffered serious bites to his left leg and stomach and is being treated at a Phuket hospital prior to surgery to avoid the risk of infection.

At the tiger park, tourists are invited into a special caged enclosure with handlers as part of the visitor experience.

“We did everything as the park people advised,” Goudie told reporters from the online news service Phuketwan at the hospital.

“I am not sure why it bit me,” he said.

He punched the tiger as it attacked him.

“When it did [attack] I had no choice except to whack it in the face a couple of times,” he said.

Thai authorities say Goudie, who has two steel pins in an ankle, may have moved awkwardly as park handlers assisted him back to his feet, with the unusual movement triggering an attack. The tiger was tasered by park staff, forcing it to retreat.

A visiting doctor at the scene provided assistance until an ambulance and emergency staff arrived.

“The handler was with us the whole time. The tiger was 15 months old. I was patting him, everything was fine. I just stood up to leave,” Goudie said.

Goudie is on a two-week holiday in Phuket with his family.

His son, 16-year old Jake Goudie, said the injuries were largely to his father’s left leg and stomach.

“The tiger couldn’t get a good grip on my dad’s stomach,” Jake said.

Thai officials said the tiger park was to be closed for two days while investigations into the accident were conducted. The young tiger will no longer have contact with visitors.

Goudie, who has a tattoo of a tiger, praised the park’s staff and said he was even considering another tiger tattoo.

“I don’t want anything to happen to the tiger,” he said. “I don’t want it killed.” Read more 

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Thais are easygoing about personal safety. If you want to play with a tiger or a snake, they’ll let you. They assume you know the risks. If the tiger mauls you, the crocodile bites you, or the snake crushes you…that’s your business. There’s no legal recourse. No-one holds you back from taking risks, and no-one compensates you if you’re injured as a result. Last year a woman, an experienced Australian veterinarian (she worked with farm animals in the Australian countryside) approached a Thai pigmy elephant without having been introduced – and the animal charged her, gored her, and killed her. This year it’s someone who should know better: a Thai. A Thai monk, in fact.

A Buddhist monk in Khao Saming district of Trat province was killed when he tried to chase away a wild elephant entering the temple looking for food.

The incident happened Sunday night at Wat Khao Cha-om temple in Village Group 8 of Tambon Sator of Khao Saming district. However the body of the monk identified later as Phra Prasit Jakavaro.

Temple boys told the police that several wild elephants entered the temple area last night as they used to in the past few months looking for food.

Phra Prasit came out of his living place to chase the elephants as usual.

But this time one elephant didn’t go but charged into the monk. He ran around a mango tree in bid to escape but couldn’t make through.

He was pulled with the trunk and smashed at the tree, and stepped on the head by the angry elephant.

He died with his face to the ground near the tree. His face was crushed and skull and several bones were also broken.

The abbot of the temple said wild elephants coming down from mountains for food was a chronic problem of the temple and villagers.

He said two years ago a villager was also killed by wild elephants in the same area.

Source: http://englishnews.t…ant-kills-monk/

Bear in mind that elephants are highly emotional, intelligent, and proud creatures. Treat Thailand’s dangerous elephants with great respect and equally great caution and you’ll find them to be wonderful, even inspiring.

More reading on Thailand’s wild elephants:

• CITES Met in Bangkok To Protect At-Risk Plants and Wildlife … – USAID, along with the State Department and Embassy Bangkok, are working together to protect wildlife and plants in Thailand. … Posted by Kristie A. Kenney, U.S. Ambassador to Thailand on Wednesday, March 13th 2013 … While the plight of elephants, tigers, rhinos, and other great animals get a lot of the attention, it’s important not to forget the thousands of other plant and animal species that have been threatened by human exploitation — sometimes to the point of extinction.
• U.S. Statement on the Trade Policy Review of Thailand » US … – More than a century and a half ago, the King of Thailand offered to send elephants to President Lincoln to help with the Civil War effort. Our trade has come a long way since then. Last year, it reached $35 billion in two-way …
• Surin Elephant Festival – HubPages – The Surin Elephant Festival is an annual event in the Kingdom of Thailand. The origins are lost in time but probably originated from a couple of mahouts bragging as …
• Wild Thailand: Elephants, Cobras and Tigers – GoNOMAD Travel – Wild Thailand: Elephants, Cobras and Tigers. By David Rich. After a half dozen trips to Thailand it can get boring, except for a single friend of mine who travels yearly for the adventure of serial Thai ladies. For him it seems to never get boring.

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And here’s a reminder about riding scooters in Thailand:

Riding a motorcycle or scooter in Thailand comes with unique responsibilities and dangers. Scooters are wonderful in traffic but they have 4 drawbacks:

• You’re vulnerable to any mistakes in road design and construction.
• No matter what or who you hit, you lose.
• They’re a bitch in the rain.
• Range.

1. Road design, construction and maintenance create hazards.

• Lethal obstacles are often built into Thai roads. My favorite? Where freeways cross an overpass, they build raised footpaths out into the motorcycle lane – withno warning. These deathtraps freaked me out until I learned to anticipate them.
• Though roads are well maintained, safety is casual. A Thai friend was killed riding her motorcycle home in the rain when she hit an unmarked pothole on a main street.
• I slid off because someone  spilled cooking oil around a curve.

So understand the physical situation and be far more vigilant than at home.

2. No matter what or whom you hit, you lose.

You already know that you’re much more vulnerable on two wheels than on four. But driving anything in Thailand carries an additional responsibility: you pay all costs for an accident. Because you’re a farang you are rich and the rule here is that the party with more money pays the costs. (If you have first-class insurance, even your insurance company will agree to pay, despite your innocence) If you are clearly not at fault and there’s been no injury, either leave the scene asap or offer the other driver a 1,000 Baht note ($33), apologize, and drive off.

When an old Thai on a motorcycle drove along the curb past stopped traffic, straight through a stop light, he hit me hard. Bystanders wanted to call the cops so I would be forced to pay for the accident. To his credit, the gentleman waved them off, but commonly, people you collide with will refuse responsibility. Thais’ main goal is to prove that they were not responsible for the accident (or anything, it seems sometimes). 1,000 baht is usually sufficient to prove that they’re correct.

3. Bikes and scooters are a bitch in the rain.

Thailand’s rainy season makes motorcycling a watersport. You’ll need a poncho, which can be had for as little as $2 in many shops, that has high visibility and you’ll need plenty of tread on your tires. And, of course, you’ll need to drive very cautiously. It’s a white-knuckle experience that’s best avoided. I simply follow elderly Thai drivers. They’ve been doing it all their lives.

4. Mileage Vs. Range

Exhilarated by the fact that your scooter gets 98 miles to the gallon, you set off for a pretty village 40 miles away. After a beautiful day in the mountains you head home and, along the way, discover that you’re running low on fuel. Of course, gas stations have disappeared and there’s no sign of another one. How could this be happening when the scooter gets such great mileage? Simple: its tank holds as little as 1 gallon of gasoline. So…top up your tank whenever it drops below half. A backup plan: most country stores sell gasoline. Yep, in beer bottles, for a couple of bucks. Just ask for N̂ảmạnbensin pord while pointing plaintively to your gas tank and you’ll soon be back in the saddle.

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The Thai government has approved a $23 billion infrastructure project including two lines that could revolutionize the region’s freight service, linking ports around Bangkok and in Singapore with Kunming and onward to Berlin. The pan-Asian rail network has been on the drawing board for decades. Some routes were mapped when British and French colonialists wanted to counter Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway. Now China is driving the project.

Singapore and Bangkok are closer to China’s vast southwest than China’s east coast ports. Singapore and Bangkok also offer access to strategic shipping lanes where much of the world’s oil is transported, along with service to he world’s fastest-developing nations in SE Asia. China has now pledged $11.4 billion to build two rail lines–one from Kunming (capital of Yunnan) to the Laos border and the other from Dali in western Yunnan to the Myanmar border. Both tracks must run through Thailand, the only land bridge to Singapore. Malaysia and Singapore have already approved a high-speed line to be finished by 2020.

Chalongphob Sussangkarn, a Thai government advisor, says China’s participation as a rail partner and a business competitor, is on everyone’s mind. “But, if you don’t have a link to southern China in the next 20 years, this will really be an enormous lost opportunity.”

Thailand was among Asia’s earliest exponents of rail: the Royal State Railways of Siam was formed in 1890 and, within 15 years, lines were running north and south. It became the State Railway of Thailand in 1951. But modernization and maintenance failed to keep pace. Investment shifted to roads as new policies encouraged private automobiles. Now the pendulum is swinging back. A daily air service opened earlier this year that connects KunMing and Chiang Mai. And here’s an item from last week’s APEC meeting:

BANGKOK: — THAILAND is more than ready to cooperate with China to develop the road-transport network that is part of the economic quadrangle linking Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and China, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha told China’s President Xi Jinping during a meeting in Beijing yesterday.

Prayut, who arrived in this Chinese capital yesterday to participate in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Summit, met Xi and told him that Thailand appreciated China’s strategies in developing the R3A route – which when constructed could become one of the world’s prominent economic routes. China has been hailed for initiating the land and sea ‘Silk Roads’. The route would link China and Thailand through Laos.

Route R3A is part of the so-called North-South Economic Corridor that will link Thailand with Laos and China. The road route from China’s Kunming will cross the Mekong River at Huay Xai in Laos at the Friendship Bridge and enter Thailand at Chiang Khong in Chiang Rai province.

Government Spokesman Yongyuth Mayalarp quoted Prayut as referring to a proposed railway project, that Bangkok was ready to cooperate with China in developing the dual-track rail link that would connect Thailand, China and other countries.

Prayut also thanked Beijing for continuously importing Thai agricultural products particularly fruit, jasmine rice, and rubber, the spokesman said. Both leaders agreed to hold further talks in a bid to alleviate problems and obstacles in bilateral trade of agricultural products between the nations.

Beijing was told that Bangkok backed its policy to use of the yuan as a common currency of Asia, the spokesman said, adding China would support business transactions in yuan to decrease currency exchange risks and costs. “They also hope the agreement on the Chinese Yuan and the Thai Baht Bilateral Currency Swap Arrangement which will expire next month, could be extended.”

Referring to the education cooperation between the countries, the spokesman said Thailand and China agreed to expand cooperation on science, technology, research and innovation because China had advanced technology and a forum could be held so scientists from both countries could work and study together more closely.

China also wanted to support the development of Thailand’s vocational education.

Prayut also invited his Chinese counterpart to attend the Great Mekong Sub-region Summit to be held in Thailand on December 19-20, the spokesman said. Read more…

The next we’ll hear is the cry, ‘All aboard the Singapore Chiang Mai Kunming Rail Line!

Book Thai train tickets here.

Read more about Thailand’s Kra Canal and the Belt and Road Initiative here..

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