more-in Playful and curious, the three-month-old white tiger cub hops around in the comfort of its enclosure at the Indira Gandhi Zoological Park (IGZP). The male cub, one of the youngest inmates of the zoo, was born to the white tiger, Kumari, and will soon woo the hearts of the visitors to the zoo. The officials are now gearing up to release the cub for public viewing from this Saturday. “After birth, the initial three months are critical for the cubs to survive. Thankfully, its mother has taken very good care, and the cub is doing very well. It will soon complete four months. We will be releasing the cub in the day kraal enclosure on World Ozone Day and celebrate the occasion with a special programme. White tigers have always been a big draw for the visitors in the zoo,” curator B. Vijaya Kumar told The Hindu. Vizag zoo has been credited with breeding a significant number of white tigers in captivity in the last eight years. With the birth of the male cub, the zoo now has a total of six white tigers. It has revived captive breeding of white tigers after a gap of nine years. Vizag is probably one among the few zoos, after Nandankanan in Bhubaneswar, to boast of a sizeable number of white tigers. At one point of time, the number touched nine, following which a couple of animal exchange programmes had been done, wherein some of the white tigers were exchanged for two giraffes from the Malaysian zoo and a rhino from the Kanpur zoo. Currently, four white tigers – three adults and the cub – are kept at the white tiger enclosure in the zoo and the remaining at the Royal Bengal tiger enclosure due to space constraint. The zoo’s first white tiger, Sireesh, was brought from Hyderabad in 2003. To give the loner a company, Kumari was transferred to the zoo in 2006 from Hyderabad. Since then, the pair has had three successful litters. The first was in 2009 when three cubs were born. Later, in 2011, five cubs were born in the second litter, out of which one died.

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