The Tiger

I am fortunate enough to have some data on this topic provided by Mel Sunquist in his work dated 1981: The social organisation of tigers in Royal Chitawan National Park, Nepal . The Information is also published in his book Wild Cats of the World, published in 2002. The calculation goes as follows. Each tigress makes 45 kills annually and eats 46 kg of meat at each kill. This results in an overall annual figure of 2070 kg of meat consumed. Fiona Sunquist, his wife, decided that the figure is "probably realistic, as it is similar to the amount of meat fed to zoo tigers: 5 to 6 kilograms per day. Tiger eating. Photo: Pixabay. They also state that non-reproducing female tigers require an average of 3.7 kg per day. Male tigers require an average of 4.8 kg per day as researched by ES Dierenfeld in 1987 in their work Nutritional considerations in captive tiger management, in Tigers of the world: The biology, biopolitics, management, and conservation of an endangered species . Tigers do...

Do tigers eat fish? Yes, is the answer but perhaps the better question is "Do tigers want to eat fish?" Fish is edible to a tiger but it is not a typical prey animal for the tiger. The fish is too small and they're not going to bump into a fish very often. Also they need to pray on large animals to sustain themselves but they are opportunistic hunters and each pretty well anything which presents itself to them. That's why you see in the video below a private zookeeper feeding his tigers with fish and they appear to be liking it a lot. I think the zoo is in South Africa as he has a South African accent. What I don't like a lot is this man's private zoo. It's horrible. South Africa has a poor reputation for wild animal welfare (e.g. canned lion hunts and selling lion body parts to China). But fortunately it answers the question. Tigers do eat fish but they won't go out of their way to find fish to eat because it is just is not viable to do so. They are f...

An adult tiger eats from 18 to 27 kilograms of food a night (40 - 60 pounds). Other examples of how much tigers eat at one sitting or during one day are as follows: A male tiger ate 35 kilograms of flesh in one night (77 lbs). A tigress consumed 30 kilograms of flesh at one sitting (an adult chital). It took her from mid-morning on one day to the morning of the next day to do it. A tigress and and two young ate 102 kilograms (225 pounds) of flesh in two days (17 kgs per animal per day) One large buffalo plus an adult cow were eaten in six days by four tigers. The maximum a tiger can eat over 24 hours is a fifth of its body weight which for a large male equals 45 kgs. At the end of eating the carcass of the prey, it will be decomposing.  The flesh of a carcass decomposes in two days in hot weather. Tigers will eat putrified flesh covered in maggots and when finishing a large carcass tigers may spend more than half their time eating decomposing flesh. Meat putrefies in a co...