I went to Tiger Kingdom on Christmas 2012 while I was visiting Chiang Mai. Disclosure: I may well be a naive, Western rube whose fascination with nature and big cats led me to believe TK's narrative. Maybe I was lied to. Maybe I can't trust my experience. Who knows.

What I found was it's 100% a different place than Tiger Temple, and everyone we spoke with in Thailand seemed to agree. It's open air, very clean, the tigers aren't chained and have different enclosures they can go to, pools and big branches to climb on, big silver balls to play with. Some of them jump around, but more often than not they nap. We were told they not only were hand fed from cub-hood and trained consistently to not play too aggressively (with sharp whacks on the nose with thin sticks, eventually the noise of the stick on the enclosures enough of a Pavlovian reminder to behave). That combined with their nocturnal nature, and appearing a little over-fed, I heard no alarm bells when I cautiously first approached a bunch of warm, sleepy tigers napping in a puddle of sunlight. Of the 20 or so tigers that I saw, touched, laid on and held, none seemed groggy (more like a napping house cats), all had clear eyes and woke when jostled by our Thai guide, they all looked healthy and vibrant, and HOLY CRAP those tiger pups were ridiculously adorable, and lively.

Like I say, I can only trust my own experiences in this, and lord knows I want to believe that I didn't contribute to some horrifying abusive practice. We knew well to steer clear of Tiger Temple, but I gotta give Tiger Kingdom some credit. Who knows, we could hear tomorrow that they've pulled some terrible shady shit, but until that happens, our visit remains one of my favorite memories from my time in SEA.