Newsweek Exposes the Cruelty Behind Breeding White Tigers

 

I’ve been working in the area behind Nirvana for the past several days and have had the pleasure of hearing tour guides talking about the white tiger issue.  I have heard the amazement in the voices of the guests as they learned that every thing they thought knew about white tigers was wrong.

 

I have heard guests try to argue the facts or ignore the new information by proclaiming that they still think white tigers are beautiful.  It has given me a new appreciation for what all of you go through when giving tours.  It especially impresses me that some of you, who are still so new to the knowledge yourselves, manage to be firm in your presentations while still being kind to the guests.

 

This week a thirty year old secret was exposed in Newsweek, the second largest weekly magazine in America.  Sharyn Beach exposed it in Britannica Online Encyclopedia in March of this year.  It is the same secret that Big Cat Rescue exposed 11 years ago as the first organization to go public with the truth about the white tiger.

 

What I knew in 1998 was that people could sell a white tiger cub for $60,000 and just about all of the breeders and dealers and zoos were out to breed them.  I had been to facilities such as the one where Shere Khan was born, (Dennis Hill in Flatrock, IN) and where Modnic, TJ & Bella came from (Robert Baudy of Savage Kingdom in Center Hill, FL) and where Auroara had come from (Predators Plus).  What I saw haunted me because I saw many tigers who had horrible deformities;  teeth going in all directions, eyes out on the nose, clubbed feet and lame hips.

 

These birth defects were primarily in the white tigers, but some of their golden litter mates were affected as well.  I started asking about who the tigers’ parents were, who their siblings were, and discovered that people were inbreeding these cats.  They never used that word, but rather would say “line breeding” or “selective breeding” or they would make outrageous claims about how they had “created” a line of white tigers by choosing the best pairings. In 1998 there were only 200 white tigers world wide.  With Siegfried and Roy promoting white tigers as Royal White Bengal tigers the breeders scurried to meet demand.

 

Especially complicit were the Cincinnati Zoo & the Nashville Zoo who knew that the origins of white tigers only came from severe inbreeding.  It was common knowledge to breeders that there was an 80% mortality rate.  They should have put an end to it right then and there, but white tigers were a novelty and people would pay to see them.  The accredited zoos, who actually keep pedigrees on their tigers, knew that inbreeding was the only way to increase their probability of getting that money making white cub.

 

In 1998 I still thought that most of the breeders and dealers out there were just ignorant.  I was a member of AZA and had been attending their conferences and meeting their cat experts to find out what they thought to be best practices.  I thought that if the private sector knew better they would behave better and so I spent a lot of time writing articles for their club called the Feline Conservation Federation (FKA the Long Island Ocelot Club).  I was part of their list serve and participated in discussions about exotic cat husbandry in the hopes of helping their cats have better lives.  We had only had the Internet for a couple of years and were still trying to find ways to use it to band all exotic cat owners together for a comprehensive repository of information on best practices.  Our own website had only been up for two years and I was using it as a way of making all of the lessons we had learned available for everyone else.  I figured the reason all of these breeders had so many defective tigers was because they didn’t know that they were all so inbred and they were just making it worse by not keeping records.

 

I proposed all of what I knew about white tigers on our w