Golden Tigers in Zoos
Few zoos have bred or exhibited golden tigers and many have no knowledge of the color or its mode of inheritance. It therefore usually appears by accident when breeding orange and white tigers together rather than through planning. As white tigers and heterozygous normal colored tigers are traded and loaned between zoos and circuses for breeding, if they also carry the wide band gene, that gene becomes widespread. When their descendants are mated together, the golden tiger color is passed on to the offspring if both parents are gene carriers. Unless golden tabby cubs are born, the zoos may have no idea that the parents carry that gene.
The first golden tiger cub born in captivity was in 1983 and this came from standard-colored Bengal tigers, both of whom carried the recessive genes for both the golden tiger and white colors. It was born at Dr. Josip Marcan's Adriatic Animal Attractions in Deland, Florida.
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Famous quotes containing the words golden, tigers and/or zoos:
“We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)