On 8 March, specialists of the Primorye Territory Department of Hunting Supervision caught two tiger cubs whose mother was captured near the village of Alexey-Nikolskoye in the Ussuriysk District in early February. Both cubs are female, aged six or seven months, and look healthy and fit. After the capture, the cubs were immobilised and sent to the Centre for the Rehabilitation and Reintroduction of Tigers and Other Rare Animals (Tiger Centre). For now, they are living in a separate enclosure from the tigress.

“The examination of the tigress showed that she fed no cubs with her milk. But specialists predicted that she had two cubs less than a year old. We had to do a lot of work to catch them. I think there is no need to explain why we first caught the tigress and not the other way around: because in this case it could have ended badly for humans as well as for the tigress, since a mother would never abandon her children. The cubs were not in danger, because the information about their capture was kept secret and specialists spent the whole time in their home range feeding them. Nevertheless, we were worried about this, because we had no experience in catching a female with two cubs,” Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Centre, said.

Today the future of the family depends on the condition and behaviour of the tigress. If she has overcome her trauma or illness that made her attack dogs near the village, she and her cubs will be released into the wild as soon as in May. If not, the cubs will be released separately next spring.