Employees of the Primorye Territory Wildlife Protection Directorate are attempting to use food to attract three tiger cubs and thus divert them from nearby villages. The tiger cubs, who lost their mother, came to a military base of the Yakovlevsky District on Tuesday, 27 November, said Vladimir Vasilyev, Head of the Primorye Territory Wildlife Protection Directorate.

The three tiger cubs were drawn to the military base by a barking dog. The cubs tried to kill the dog, but a local guard forced the cubs back into the forest. Wildlife Protection Directorate specialists are now searching for the cubs' mother.

"Yesterday the specialists tried to find the tigress but in vain. The cubs were nearby, the specialists saw them. These are rather large tiger cubs, about six months old. They can already hunt and they could have killed the dog if they hadn't been scared off," Vladimir Vasilyev said. On Wednesday evening, the tiger cubs reached the outskirts of a village in the Yakovlevsky District and rummaged through waste bins. Another barking dog probably attracted the cubs to the waste bins, he said.

"Since morning, a team of the Directorate has been seeking to divert the cubs from the location by placing meat of wild animals at a distance from the location. If the tigress is not found, the specialists will continue to divert the cubs in this manner for at least two or three days more," he said. He explained that the specialists are currently deciding whether to keep feeding the cubs to keep them away from villages, or to catch them and temporarily house them in an open-air enclosure.

"We have filed a request with the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources to temporarily keep the cubs at our facilities. In the meantime, their mother can be located. There have been some cases where the tigress left its cubs for a fortnight and returned later," Vasilyev said. The tiger cubs do not pose a threat to people, so the decision to keep them at a special facility would be to protect them from people, not the other way around, he said.