Backstory: In the Tiger Temple

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Storm, a stately 7-year-old male, lounges in the shade under a beach parasol. Phusit tells me to lower myself into the folded-kneed lotus position beside the tiger. But I'm not to start meditating (though fervent prayer will presently serve me well). "Hold his head like that, good for pictures," the abbot tells me in English, and I find myself cradling Storm's head in my lap.

Storm loves posing for photographs, I'm told; he's recently gained national fame starring in a soap opera appropriately called "The Tiger." He yawns, baring his fangs; I freeze.

Storm arrived in 1999 as a mewing, week-old kitten and was named after Thunderstorm, the abbot's first adopted tiger cub who had just died. Phusit had by then acquired a reputation locally as a Dr. Doolittle of sorts, treating and feeding a variety of injured wild animals and abandoned pets brought to his care. Thunderstorm's mother had been poached in the lawless jungles near the Thai-Burmese border. A few weeks later, Storm and his twin were brought to the monastery by locals – their mother, too, killed by poachers.

"I didn't know what to do with them, but I couldn't just let them die," Phusit recalls. Soon another cub was brought, and another. "Poachers think the bad karma of killing a tigress is cancelled out by saving her cubs."

As long as poached tigers fetch up to $6,000 on the black market, Phusit can expect a steady supply of cubs. The slaughtered adult animals are smuggled to apothecaries in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai where they become indispensable ingredients for holistic remedies for all manner of human ailment.

Over the past century, 95 percent of Asia's once-ubiquitous tigers have disappeared. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that the Indo-Chinese tiger population has dwindled to between 1,200 and 1,800. With their jungle habitat disappearing, their future may lie only in captivity.

Several of the Tiger Temple's own 17 cats were born here. Funding is being raised for a 12-acre reserve to afford them a more natural environment, from which future generations could perhaps be released back into the wild.

Today's temple tigers couldn't survive alone, and surely they'd also be loath to give up their privileges such as rubdowns in traditional Thai massage, cuddling with keepers, and using monks' feet as pillows for naps. And sweet-toothed Skywards still relishes the tasty milk tablets they were fed as cubs.

"I love them all equally. They're my children," says the abbot, who treats the animals with a spiritual familiarity. He believes his temple's striped residents were fellow monks in their previous incarnation. If they lead peaceful lives, they'll be rewarded by being reborn as humans again, he says. He's convinced by Skywards's vigilance and pensive gaze that the 4-year-old tiger is the re-incarnation of a former monastery gatekeeper.

Still, spiritual overtones notwithstanding, hobnobbing with the big cats can be a nerve-racking experience. Witness the burly Russian tourist standing beside Sunshine: While being photographed, he forces a tortured grin.

The abbot himself has no such fears. Ja, a taxi driver who often brings tourists to the monastery, tells me that a few minutes before 5 each afternoon, just as their daily four-hour outing is about to end, tigers that would rather be back at their caged quarters and have a bite of dog and cat food (their main dietary staple) begin to get restless. "[Phusit] calls out to them, 'Take it easy, just five more minutes!' And they immediately calm down. They always listen to him!"

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