The Tiger

If two tigers meet in the wild, will they fight? Well, the first point to make is that in the wild, each tiger has a territory about as big as a modern city. Male ranges are a lot bigger than females' and male ranges include female ranges . Territorial ownership is marked out by spraying scented urine against trees and scratching the bark with sharp claws. This is a way of tigers preventing meeting up. It's a way of keeping them apart because they realise that fights between rivals can be so damaging even to the winner that it may impair their survival. So male tigers avoid other male tigers and female tigers avoid other female tigers. When a male tiger meets a female even outside the breeding season there is a small friendly greeting using a close call sounding like: fuf-fuf-fuf . But there are two instances under which tigers might fight: times of flux and tension over resources and territory. The most sought-after resources for a male tiger in the wild are female tigers and...

The Indian Forest Service official, Susanta Nanda, says in his tweet that this is a 'herd of tigers' because of the number of offspring which is 5. Normally around 4 is the maximum and my book on the tiger states that a tigress "may give birth to 1-7, although a tigress in the wild is rarely accompanied by more than 2 or 3 cubs. In Nepal, the average size of 49 litters was 2.98. In zoos, the average litter size at birth is 2.8, and an equal numbers of males and females are born". A Bengal female tiger and a 5 cubs which is rare because the average litter size prey tiger is around 2.8 The official is correct and therefore this is an unusual video and a good one because it not only shows us the tigress and cubs but the way the wildlife officials and indeed the way tourists see tigers in their natural habitat. Although, it is said that, if there are too many tourists it disturbs the tigers to the point where they can no longer behave naturally. If you haven’t seen a tige...

The video and still photograph from the video show an Amur tigress (Siberian tigress) walking through deep snow in the Far East of Russia. She has become a mother for the third time. The video was captured by a camera trap. Below the video is the text accompanying the video in English translated from the Russian. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Центр «Амурский тигр» (@amurtigercenter) Note : This is a video from another website which is embedded here. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it. These words accompany the above video on Instagram:  Tigress Svetlaya became a mother for the third time. Having shown two 4-5 months old tiger cubs to a trail camera, Svetlaya, one of the "founding mothers" of the tiger population in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast made a New Year present to specialists of the Amur Tiger Center, the Tiger Center and the Hun...

This is one of those extraordinary pictures of a huge predator, a tigress, not killing and eating a prey animal that is right next to her. But rather than kill and eat this fawn the tigress appears to be relating to the young animal as one of her offspring.  Tigress carries a fawn in her mouth as if she is carrying her own cub. Photo: Instagram. Perhaps she is pregnant (see looks it) and those mothering emotions are coming out and dominating the emotion to attack, kill and eat. And sometimes tigers are curious so they don't always (albeit very rarely) kill and eat prey animals.  We have seen it before in fact with large predators, particularly big cats. I've seen a leopard playing with a young antelope, for example.  I guess sometimes these encounters start like this but lead to the death of the prey animal because the instincts of the tiger are somewhat jumbled up and at the end of the day the dominant instinct is to kill.  Notwithstanding that I am reassured tha...

There are records of males killing cubs, and some of these instances of infanticide occurred at kills. So for young cubs, the vicinity of a kill can be a dangerous place because of the likelihood of encountering other tigers there.  Tiger cubs are vulnerable to being killed at kill sites by adult male tigers. Photo: Pixabay. The words are quoted verbatim from the book Wild Cats of the World . I take the words to mean that at a kill site where there is competition to eat the carcass of an animal, male tigers will kill a much smaller tiger i.e. a cub, to ensure access to the food.  To the best of my knowledge, tigers do not kill cubs in order to bring the mother into heat so that they can procreate and generate their own offspring. Tigers don't do this or at least my research indicates this. But lions do. My research also indicates that sometimes in India's tiger reserves they use a buffalo, a live buffalo actually, as bait to draw tigers into an area so that tourists can wat...