Calgary Zoo takes tiger cub from den

A Siberian tiger cub born at the Calgary Zoo on Monday morning has been removed from the care of its mother, but is reported to be in stable condition.

Though zoo staff at first felt Katja, the mother, was taking good care of the female cub, she left the den in the late afternoon on Tuesday and did not return, the zoo said in a release.

Staff monitored the cub with an infrared camera and observed that its movements were becoming less frequent. At about 7:30 p.m. MT, senior animal care staff decided to intervene.

"Having seen the cub suckle, our hope was that we could check the cub's status, provide supplementary feeding if necessary, and immediately return it to its mother," Jake Veasey, the zoo's director of animal care, said in a release.

"The vets found the cub to be dehydrated and its body temperature to be low in spite of being in a heated den. There was no other option for the immediate survival of the cub than to provide emergency treatment at the animal health centre; this will continue for as long as necessary."

The cub is considered to be in stable condition but is still in intensive care at the zoo's animal health centre.

"It's very stable but it's entirely dependent upon around-the-clock care so it's being fed through a nasal tube and being given warmth and care by a vet team 24 hours a day," Veasey told the CBC.

Zoo staff are convinced the cub would have died if they hadn't intervened, and will not return the cub to its mother any time soon, he said.

Often, when a mother leaves her young, it is because they sense a congenital problem, but Calgary Zoo staff don't know if that's the case in this instance, he said.

Staff believe the female cub would have died if they hadn't intervened, Veasey said.

Katja also gave birth to two cubs unexpectedly in fall. Both died due to head trauma from being carried around improperly by the mother.

This birth was anticipated after staff saw male tiger Baikal and Katja successfully mate, the zoo said.

Rob Laidlaw, the founder of Zoocheck, which campaigns to close substandard zoos and improve conditions for animals in captivity, questioned the wisdom of breeding captive Siberian tigers at all.

"While the zoo claims that they are breeding them for conservation purposes, there's no mechanism for putting these animals back into the wild, so they're really just breeding them to maintain them in zoo displays and there's not really a lot of conservation purpose," he said.

Laidlaw said it's hard to tell whether Katja's maternal instincts have been disrupted by captivity, but it wouldn't be unusual.

"Many animals are distorted in captivity," he said. "You see a wide range of species that engage in behaviours that aren't seen in the wild."

Siberian, or Amur, tigers are endangered, with only about 350 left in the wild. The survival rate for tiger cubs, both in the wild and in captivity, is one in three, the zoo said.

The Calgary Zoo has four adult tigers. One is going to be sent to the Toronto Zoo soon as part of the co-ordinated species survival program for Siberian tigers.