Orphaned baby tigers stumble out of Siberian forest:
Two wild baby tigers, orphaned and famished, scrambled out of a Siberian forest in eastern Russia and into the hands of startled loggers, the Russian ministry of natural resources said.The two female tigers — one seriously wounded — offered practically no resistance as the loggers took them into captivity about 50 kilometers from the fishing village of Ternei, north of Vladivostok.
Officials called in from the Amur nature reserve for the protection of tigers examined the exhausted cubs, one of which succumbed to its injuries soon thereafter.
“The state of the wounded tiger got worse and it was decided to send both animals to a veterinarian clinic in the village of Razdolny near Vladivostok,” explained Vitali Starostine, a special “tiger” inspection officer in the reserve.
“But the trip of nearly 700 kilometers proved too taxing for the little animal, and she died,” he said.
“The second tiger is in good health and she withstood the trip well. She is exhausted and will need medical care for about a month,” Starostine said.
A search for the mother of the cubs proved fruitless, and officials suspected that she had been fatally wounded or killed.
There remain only 500 tigers in the wilds of the Amur region in Russia’s far east. About a dozen of them fall victim to poachers every year, according the World Wildlife Fund.
(Note: The tiger cub pictured is from the Berlin Zoo.)