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The white tiger, discovered in the forests of Rewa
in 1951 has now crossed international boundaries and can be found in
zoos and circuses all over the world.
Tiger in a hotel lobby
and that too a white tiger: it looks graceful and grand. And watching
a full-grown, majestic white tiger in a Las Vegas hotel, the
spectators wonder how this handsome animal would look in its natural
surroundings: the forest. But nobody has seen an adult white tiger in
the forest in recent tines. In fact, the white tiger in the hotel
lobby and the other odd white tigers scattered elsewhere, have been
hand reared and almost all owe their existence to one male white
tiger Mohan, found in the forests of Rewa in India, way back in 1951.
At the Delhi zoo,
enclosure number 88 houses the white tiger. It is not absolutely
without colour: a coat of off-white forms a background for ash or
light brown stripes, the nose is a grayish-pink and the eyes a chilly
blue. The white tiger is larger in size as compared to its orange
coloured cousins. But the story of the present far-flug family of
white tigers goes back to its patriarch Mohan, who lived all of 20
years.
The Maharaja of the
erstwhile state of Rewa, in Madhya Pradesh, caught a nine month old
white tiger cub from the forest. Mohan was part of a litter of four
cubs, the rest of which were the usual orange colour.
The young Mohan was
reared at the Govindarh palace and at maturity mated with an orange
coloured tigress Begum from Mohan and Begum’s second litter of
four cubs, born in 1955 Radha one female cub, was later mated with
Mohan. This union produced the first four white tiger cubs born in
captivity in 1958: Raja Rani, Mohani and Sukheshi. In all Radha had
fourteen cubs of which eleven were white. In 1963, in accordance
with an agreement with the Government of India, the Maharaja of Rewa
gifted four white tigers to the National Zoological Park at Delhi.
Raja and Rani, a white pair, progeny of Radha, were sent to the park
and Mohan and Sukheshi were retained at Govindgarh at the expense of
the Government of India. The offspring of these two pairs was to be
shared equally between the Maharaja and the Government.
Though whit tiger
breeding has been undertaken in centers like the Nehru Zoological
Park, Hydra bad, the Alipore Zoological Gardens, Calcutta and the
Shri Chamarajendra Zoological Garden Mysore, the National Zoological
Park at Delhi is the principal breeding center. To retain special
characteristics, in this case the white coat colour, a certain
amount of inbreeding was inevitable.
Mohan’s descendants
are scattered in zoos all over India: one each at the Nehru
Zoological Park in Hyderabad Sanjay Gandhi Park in Patna, Guwahati,
Kanpur and Chhatbir in Punjab; two at the Calcutta zoo; while the
Nandankanan park in Bhubneswar houses the largest collection with 22
whites. The Shri Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens in Mysore has two
white tiger and has sent cubs to Baroda, Bhopal Calcutta, Aurangabad,
Jaipur, Trivendrum and the Venus Circus.
Mohan’s progeny have
crossed international boundaries, and are prospering abroad. In
1960, the National Zoological Park in Washington USA, bought a white
tiger from the Maharaja of Rewa. In 1970, the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio
bought Kesari from the Washington Zoo who was a carrier of the white
coat genre. Kesari was mated with Tony a white tiger from the
Hawthorne Circus of Illinois. As each belonged to disparate blood
lines, the litters were healthy, and of the two sets produced, four
cubs were white and one orange. The Cincinnati Zoo also has the
distinction of having produced the maximum number of white tiger, 52
of them since 1970 . White tigers can also be found in circus all
over the world from the USA, and Canada to Japan.
With 28 white tigers, the
Hawthorne Circus from Illinois in the USA, forms the largest
collection at present. This group includes the offspring of Susie,
Bengal tigress and Kubla, a Siberian from Sioux Falls Zoo in South
Dakota. The descendants of this line are hybrid Bengal and Siberian
Lee G.Simmons of the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha maintains that there
are only two pure white Bengal tigers in the USA and both are
incapable of breeding. Other heterozygous orange tiger can be found
at the Racine Zoological Gardens in Wisconsin, while in England the
zoo at Bristol has Roop and Akbar II and Sumati and Nanda… the
list is much longer, for the white tiger is a crowd puller all over
the world!
Experts opine that human
beings have always been attracted by black and white creatures. Zoos
have drawn crowds whenever they exhibit cats with varying degrees of
the concentration of the pigment melanin, for instance the black
panther, and hence the interest in the white tiger. What was at first
thought to be an albino proved to be the result of a gene mutation.
The breeding records clearly show that the orange coat gene is more
dominant than the recessive white coat gene. Though Indian and
foreign zoos value the white tiger, there are detractors: the
director of the New York Zoological Society once felt that White
tigers are freaks, and it is not the role of the zoo to show
two-headed claws and white tigers. Luckily however there is
sufficient evidence to prove that the white tiger is not a freak and
it is in fact a gift of nature which should be treated as a national
treasure. Experts say that if the white tiger were to be let loose
in the jungle, it would not be at a loss because of its colouring.
Curtailing its hunting to nocturnal hours, to avoid the alarm calls
given by certain jungle birds and primates who can distinguish
colour; the tiger’s main prey species are unable to recognize
different colours.
The pale big cat may be
unlike the normal tiger in appearance, but it has the instincts of a
carnivore of the jungle. Let a bullock cart pass by in front of the
white tiger enclosure.
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