White, Black & Golden Tigers

[GuateGojira]

1- White tigers:
About the white tigers, I have the good look to found the free edition of the book “Tigers of the World”, the first edition of 1987. For a stupid reason I lost the link but I saved the PDF.
 
In this book it is stated that in fact, there are two lineages of white tigers, the one from Mohan which is the origin from all American whites and another from Orissa, which have not been mixed with Amur tigers yet. Is in the part VI of the book with chapters 34 to 36. It is a long reading, I have not finished yet.
 
This proved that at least some white tigers are viable and most be conserved, after all, white tigers were part of the wild in India and it is a myth that white tigers can’t survive in the wild, after all, Jim Corbett filmed a female white tiger with cubs! What more evidence do we need that a female that was not only able to survive, but also to breed! The problem is that the “American” white tigers are just a freak prone to deformities that must be disappear. However, to bring “pure” white tigers from the Orissa lineage is not cheap, so they prefer to defend they mixed tigers instead of conserve the “true” white tigers that still exist.

2 - Bengals in America:
Now, about the Bengal tigers in America, I have not saw a single document that state that Bengals still exist in any zoo in America, nor even ONE. In fact the AZA (American Zoo Association) breed only Amur, Sumatran and Malayan tigers. There are no Indochinese tigers in America too, all came from the Malayan region and the only “pure” Indochinese tigers in captivity are in Zoos from they own region, but none of them belongs to an international breeding program. Believe me, I was also shocked when I read all this.
 
European Zoos are also focused in Amur, Sumatran and Malayan tigers too. So, at the end, pure Indian tigers are only in India, South China tigers are only in China and South Africa and pure Indochinese tigers are only in Indochina (Thailand mostly).
 
I have also noted that most tigers in AZA zoos are Sumatran, while most of the European zoos are focused in the Amur variety. Don’t know the policies here, but it seems that for American zoos, it is easier (and cheaper) to breed small tigers than large ones.
 
The tigers from T.I.G.E.R.S. are not pure Bengals, in fact, they are a mix of Amur-Bengal and even Bagavan Antle stated in an interview at a program in NatGeo, that he believed in the theory of Kitchener (1999) and that is also used by John Varty in “Tiger canyon” in South Africa. They believe that there are no tiger subspecies at all, and then, they interbreed all its tigers, creating a useless tiger soup. Sadly indeed, but what more we can expect from a guy that bred “ligers” for the sake of money, and they have the stupid idea that this “freak giants” are ambassadors of conservation!!!

3 - Weigh in captive Bengal tigers:
Finally, about the low weight of captive Bengals, we have discussed this in past posts, and the conclusion was that Indian Zoos can’t take care very well of they tigers, so they weight much less.
 
Craig Kennion said that from 19 males in Indian Zoos recorded by his friend, the heaviest was one of 436 lb (198 kg). From another sample of 16 males, Sontakke et al. (2009) found a higher figure of up to 210 kg. Finally, the heaviest pure Bengal tiger in captivity, that I know, is a male named “Raja”, that have 12 years old and weigh 280 kg! Here is the link: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-...457625.ece
 
So yes, probably some Indian Zoos are improving them facilities in order to give a better life to them tigers. But for the moment, evidence suggests that captive Bengal tigers are, on average, no larger than the wild African lions and much lighter than the captive Amur tigers.
 
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