Tiger Trivia

• The tiger is the largest member of the cat family (felidae) and the largest land-living mammal whose diet consists entirely of meat.
• Their closest living relative may be the lion, but tigers do not live, and have never lived, in Africa.
• ‘Tigons’ have a tiger father and lioness mother, but ‘ligers’ are fathered by lions with a tiger mother. In the last century, tiger numbers are thought to have declined by a massive 95 per cent.
• A fast and powerful predator, the tiger takes its name from the Ancient Greek for ‘arrow’.
• Tigers not only have stripes on their fur, but also on their skin.
• Rather like human fingerprints, no two tigers have the same pattern of stripes.
• Stripe patterns often differ between the two sides of the tiger’s body.
• Tiger night-vision is more than five times better than that of humans.
• Adult tigers are solitary hunters.
• A male may have female territories in his own territory, but a male's territory NEVER overlaps with another male's territory!
• As with lions, male tigers may kill a female's cubs, if the cubs are the offspring of another male. This ensures that the female will bear cubs fathered by the new male.
• Adult tigers can eat up to 40kg of food at one sitting. After a big kill, they may not eat again for a week or two.
• A tiger needs almost 3,000kgs of meat a year – that’s a lot of hunting given that they only manage to catch prey in one out of 10 to 20 attempts!
• Pound for pound, a tiger has five times the pulling strength of a trained human athlete.
• Other than man, tigers have no natural predators. It is rare for tigers to attack humans.
• The few who do are normally old or ill and so less able to catch their usual prey.
• Unlike domestic cats, tigers love water and are great swimmers.
• The lifespan of a tiger is 10 to 15 years in the wild and 20 years in captivity. A tiger's roar can be heard two or three kilometres away.
• Like the domestic moggy, tigers purr.
• It is estimated that well over 10,000 tigers live in captivity around the world, which means there are currently more tigers in captivity than in the wild.