You may be getting tired of all this tiger news — hard to fathom — but we sure aren’t!
The two baby Amur tigers at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, born on Christmas Eve/Day, will shortly have new names — the naming contest just closed. And now they also have a new companion. Baby Malayan tiger Indrah, who is about the same age as the Cleveland duo, has arrived from the Tulsa Zoo so the threesome can form a “social group.”
As we learned before, Cleveland mother Zoya turned out not to have maternal instincts so the decision was made for zookeepers to hand rear the pair. The same situation happened at the Tulsa Zoo.
As zookeeper Travis Vineyard relates in this video posted by the Cleveland Zoo, “Humans can provide nutritional support. They can provide great care and food and nutrition. But we’re no substitutes for the behavior and social welfare of a solitary tiger. So it was of paramount importance that the single tiger was housed with other tigers because it’s incredibly important the social and behavior rearing for them to be raised with other tigers.”
He adds, “Bringing this tiger from the Tulsa Zoo to Cleveland is actually a really good thing for our community here in Cleveland because it gives us the opportunity to see a different subspecies of tiger than we normally have. Their interactions to date have showcased why it was such the right decision to hand rear. It was almost an immediate bonding. The trio has been nesting together, playing together.”
And you can see them playing in the video posted below. Beware of cuteness overload!