White Tigers

I have heard that the white tigers in India were born there and are pure Bengals. It is the ones in the US that are genetically polluted and horribly inbred. Can anyone confirm this?

 

You have to wade through this thread and you would find all your answers to all your questions already.

Indian zoos do have pure-bred Bengal tigers with the recessive white colour mutation. They even have a studbook for them.

Outside India all whites are related to oneanother and thus heavily inbred and polluted due to crossing with Siberians ... amongst others.

However, ... it is just a colour mutation ... why get so hung up on that? For species conservation and education - what zoos should be about - it has no value whatsoever. It is IMO just a burlesque freakshow to cynically get in visitors with proclamations of extremely rare and endangered.

On pure-bred Bengal tigers: only inside India can we safely say the Indian tigers are pure-breds. All the gene pools of Bengal tigers outside India have been crossed with Siberians et al as well (ALAS). Even the PL/Howletts groups suffered from that and when discovered no further serious work was made of them.

There is however a peculiar recommendation to have the EAZA region start a reciprocal tiger programme with Bengals, but as yet it has not been taken up. I guess the EAZA zoo community is playing low-profile untill the conservation breeding programme for Bengal tigers in India gets off the ground (should be sometime this year).

 

According to the first edition of 'Tigers of the World' ed Tilson, Seal (1988), India's White Tigers are mostly from the single Mohan line, so do suffer from the inbreeding problem. The authors report an unrelated line in Indian zoos emanating from orange white-gene carriers. I guess to produce Whites now, considering their absence from renewable sources, you have to inbreed to some degree.

 

It has been exhaustively discussed here ... that all socalled white tigers carry a recessive gene, that only one wild-caught individual from which todays' white tigers are descended was a true white coloured tiger (infamous "Mohan").

In India all subsequent breeding has been among F2/F3 generation whites emanating from the original whitexnormal coloured pairing and then back-crossed with F2/F3 generation white coloured onlys.

It does not take a genius mind to say that is inbreeding to the worst possible degree (as the white colour gene is a recessive).

Having established that it seems to take a not so genius mind to advocate that breeding Bengal white tigers is somehow valuable or conservation breeding.

 

I have put my comments on the other thread
White Tiger

 

The segment called "Living with Tigers" on Animal Planet, featuring the two tigers Ron and Julie, were they actual Bengals? Does anyone know about their history. I beileve they came from the Toronto Zoo but I am not sure. Or were they Amurs?

 

I also saw that documentary, it was mentioned in the programme that ron & julie were born in Toronto zoo however their parentage has been questioned on various different websites in the past, so i can't tell you for definate if they are pure bengals. They do carry the white gene however & i don't know if you heard, but apparently 'Julie' mated with an unrelated orange male (another white gene carrier) & produced a white female cub.
Because this project deals with tigers in wild conditions, i guess the birth of this white cub could help answer the question ''can white tigers survive in the wild''.

More info below:

John Varty newsletters

 

1) There is no question, white tigers CAN survive in the wild, as adult whites were regularly seen and hunted in India at the start of the 20th century. Jim Corbett even filmed one (he was only able to film 6 tigers total, due to their elusiveness from being hunted, but one of the 6 was white).

2) If you follow the Vary link, you will see that he apparently believes tigers are native to Africa and that establishing free ranging populations there is the answer. I saw him on David Letterman a couple years ago and not once did he mention tigers come from Asia. So sad that someone who loves tigers this much and is investing so much in saving them is so misguided.

 

Wow i wasnt aware of the Jim Corbett story, many conservationists are adamant that white tigers can not survive in the wild & although i'd always hoped they were wrong i never really found any proof to suggest otherwise. If they can survive in the wild then technically white bengal tigers could potentially serve just as much conservation value as their orange bengal cousins.

I do agree that Varty's ideas & methods can be very questionable at times & i don't agree with a few things that have gone on within his project, however in this day & age we can't really afford to loose any projects or facilities working towards preserving tigers. Shortly places such as these will probably be the last places they can thrive...

 

@Pertinax - Are you sure about that (it being a group)? I got my information from one of his own books about hunting maneaters, where he includes a 2 page afterword about his efforts to film tigers. He did it by setting up cameras in a thicket near a stream where he thought tigers would drink. Even with this approach, there were many fruitless days where he got nothing. It took him a very long period, with hours a day in the field, just to eventually get a total of 6 - apparently all single tigers except for one mother with two cubs. He mentions very casually in passing that one of them was white, almost as if it is no big deal.

So, either he lied in his own book or the information you have is an urban myth (or should we say jungle myth?). Even if it was "manipulated" as you suggest, it still occured before the capture of Mohan and the captive breeding of white tigers, so it still proves that adults could survive in the wild, since even a manipulated setup would have involved a wild-caught individual.

 

Regarding tigers in a group, George Schaller records seeing 7 on a kill (one adult male, two adult females, four young) and six (1.1.4 plus 0.2.4) on a kill on 3 occasions ('The Deer & The Tiger' p 239). Schaller was often using tethered prey to attract tigers for his observations, btw.

 

yes, I have this book. It seems that Tigers do sometimes associate together like this. Perhaps the Jim Corbett film is of a similar grouping and he baited them in the same way.

 

I remember that bit of footage! I believe it was on a National Geographic special on man-eating tigers. I've been trying to find it on YouTube.

 

If they're pure than they are beautiful creatures that serve a unique role in the Southern Asian culture and the ecosystem. If they're generic, then they're still beautiful but serve no purpose in the protection and conservation of the Bengal Tiger and should not be in any AZA or WAZA accredited zoos.

~Thylo

 

White tigers are good indeed - if not at your zoo, then at your wall.

 

How old is this mount?

 

And where is it from? It looks like it could possibly be a pure Indian tiger as it is short-furred with a 'slim' tail and small head.