A starving and exhausted tiger cub turned up at a hunters' winter hut in Primorye in late February. Specialists from the Tiger Special Inspection sent the cub to a new animal rehabilitation centre. They hope the animal will be able to participate in the Amur tiger conservation programme in the future.

The hunters found the five- or six-month-old tiger cub on Feb. 25 in a forest near the Borisovka village in the Ussuriysk District. The tiger only weighed 16 kilograms and had symptoms of hypothermia. The cub was weak, but thanks to the timely care provided by veterinary specialists and ecologists, it recovered quickly. The tiger weighs over 25 kilograms today and its appetite has also improved.

According to the Tiger Special Inspection, the female cub is nearly six months old. It was transferred to a new rehabilitation centre built in 2011 under the programme to research the Amur tiger in Russia's Far East. The programme was conducted as part of the Russian Academy of Sciences' expedition to study animals on Russia's Red List of Threatened Species and other particularly important species in Russia.

The programme is implemented with the Russian Geographic Society's financial support. Although the cub is presently in a special rehabilitation centre, it will later be transferred to an open-air cage where scientists will feed it and teach it to hunt. When the tiger is one year old, it will be set free.

Over the past three years, researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences' A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution and the Tiger Special Inspection saved and took care of five orphaned tiger cubs. They were set free and most of them successfully adapted to life in the wild in the Ussuriysk taiga.