Dog Is Surrogate Mom to Abandoned Siberian Tiger

A newborn Siberian tiger living at a zoo in Qingdao, China, was all alone in the world when it was abandoned by its mother – and that's when the maternal instincts of a very special dog kicked in.

Now the pooch is acting as its mother, nursing it and treating the feline just as she does her own pup – who appears to have bonded with his sibling-in-spirit.

Siberian tigers typically stay with their mother for the first two years of life, at which point this little guy won't be so little anymore. An adult Siberian weighs about 400 lbs.!

Escaped Siberian tiger given freedom

A tigress that avoided trappers for days after breaking out of a Russian animal protection center will be allowed to roam free, government officials said on Friday.

'We tried an experiment - would a wild tiger live and produce offspring in captivity? It didn't work out, so let her live free,' an official at Russia's Tiger Special Inspection (RTSI) project told the news agency Interfax.

Hunters had been searching for the animal, a healthy 2-year-old Siberian female named Roshkosh (Luxury), since Tuesday after she broke a cage lock with a blow from her paw and escaped into a forested region of Russia's Far Eastern Primorie district.

A transponder in a collar worn by the tiger allowed trackers to find the animal's trail almost immediately, but bait in tiger traps set nearby was left untouched.

The tiger was last seen heading northward into uninhabited taiga forest.

Animal protection agency workers captured and transported the tiger to the RTSI center in July after villagers in Russia's Khabarovsk territory, some 650 kilometers to the north of Primorie district, complained of disappearing guard dogs and livestock.

Russia's rugged Far East is home to the world's largest wild population of the highly endangered Siberian Tiger. Some 350 big cats are thought to be living in the region, most in the Primorie district's Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve.

The RTSI center is a government-funded facility for the study and protection of tigers living in Sikhote-Alin area and neighboring regions.

Russian Prime Minister Putin has been a high-profile patron of the center, and images of Putin shooting a tranquilizer dart into an adult feline have featured in his election campaigns.

China celebrates Siberian tiger cub first

A seven-year-old tiger has given birth to a cub at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, China, marking the country's first successful breeding in the wild.

After three months, the female cub is doing well and is quickly learning new skills.

A local zoologist said: "The Siberian tiger's successful breeding in the wild is an important breakthrough for us."

On June 27 and 28, the keepers could not find the female tiger, numbered 426.

They presumed she had given birth to a cub and went to look for her in a cave.

It is more than a decade since China began to study how to breed tigers in the wild.

Oil painting of Stretching Siberian Tiger

Today I finally managed to scan the final piece of the Stretching tiger in oils on linen canvas. I scanned it in 8 pieces and puzzled them together in photoshop. It’s of course no use to try and edit the colors to fit the original exactly, but I did my best anyway and that also takes it’s own time. Anyway, I still want to keep all my original scans for future references for both this website and other things. So it doesn’t really matter how many hours I put down on my scans.
So today I’m off to a birthday party and tomorrow and in Sunday to watch my sons soccer games. This will help me focus on the next paintings in line in Monday.
Anyway, here is the Siberian Tiger oil painting: