I got the following email with attached photos:
Subject: Fw: Mother of the Year!
>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 11:37 AM
> Subject: Mother of the Year!
>
>
> > I guess this tiger lost her new baby cubs and was so upset about it that they gave her some piglets to raise...dressed as tiger cubs...you have to wonder if one day she'll think her cubs smell very similar to pork chops...
> >
> >[END]
It seems these pics have been circulating around the internet with various versions of a story.
The story goes something like, a Tiger in a California Zoo miscarries a litter, and becomes so depressed, the Zoo gives her piglets dressed up as tigers and she adopts them.
But the truth about the photos is actually more interesting. From About.com:
Tiger Nurses Piglets
[...] Comments: The photos are genuine, but there's more to this story than meets the eye.
To begin with, the snapshots were taken at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand (near Bangkok), not some nameless zoo in California. Moreover, it would appear that the sad tale of the tigress falling into a deep depression after losing a litter of cubs was fabricated, as was the claim that the piglets were substituted for the deceased cubs by zookeepers in order to console the "mourning mother."
As it happens, this sort of intermingling of species is not at all unusual at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, where "creating successful relationships with animals of different species" is something of a guiding principle. The facility, more accurately described as part zoo and part circus, boasts offbeat attractions like basketball-playing elephants, "lady crocodile wrestlers," and a petting zoo where customers can bottle-feed baby tigers with their own bare hands. Visitors have reported seeing tigers, pigs, and dogs all housed together within the same enclosure, with sows nursing tiger cubs and tigresses nursing piglets "adorned in tiger-print costumes."
The costumes are strictly for show, by the way. The mother tiger pictured above, who has been photographed on other occasions suckling piglets au naturel, was herself nursed by a pig in infancy and apparently regards the other species as family, not prey. [...]
Snopes.com also gives further details:
Tiger and Piglets
While the zoo in Thailand has intermingled species successfully, it has had some other legal and health related problems.
Check out the "photographed" link in the quote above, for more pics of tigers and piggies.
2 comments:
Well its obviously not a mourning mother.. she would still have a big udder of milk on her and that animal has no milk or even slightly enlarged teets! Or even a sign of milk drying up...
And then the piglets grew up and their children DEMANDED that they DESERVED be raised by tigers, too. Then the tigers couldn't take care of their own babies and died off, and so the pigs blamed the govn'ment for not making more tigers to feed the pigs.
Post a Comment