Two tiger cubs have been examined in the wildlife rehabilitation and reintroduction center in the village of Alekseevka (Primorsky Territory). The animals are healthy, however, one of them turned out to be a male, though it was earlier identified as a female.
“Sometimes it is difficult to identify the gender of tiger cubs for sure. The good news is that we found out it now. This information radically changes the idea of where to release the animals in the future”, noted director of the Tiger Center Viktor Kuzmenko. “The cubs are developing well, and after a short separation due to the examination, they have been moved to spacious enclosures, where they’ll continue to perfect their hunter skills”.
Now the cubs are a little over a year old. The female weighs about 80 kg, and the male is 90 kg. They hunt animals put into their enclosures. They react to people like predators: seeing or hearing a human they will immediately try to lay low or hide. The experts are going to release the tigers into wild in the spring of 2019.
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It should be mentioned that the cubs were taken to the center after their tigress-mother started to hunt dogs. To prevent the locals from killing the animals, the experts caught them. The cubs, who were about six or seven months old at that time, were sent to the rehabilitation center, and their mother was taken to a zoo in Zelenogorsk.
The Amur Tiger center provides maintenance, food and veterinary support to the tiger cubs during their rehabilitation.
The Amur Tiger Center was established by the Russian Geographical Society in 2013 on the initiative of President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. The main task of the organization is to study, preserve and increase the population of the Amur tiger in Russia through environmental, scientific, cultural and educational projects.
The Amur tiger is the largest and most Northern subspecies of the tiger. In total, there are less than 600 individuals of this wild cat in the world. About 95% of the Amur tiger population lives in Russia and 5% in China. In 1947, the Amur tiger was taken under protection and tiger hunting was fully prohibited in the USSR.