He said the tiger was terminally ill before it was brought to Tehran from Russia. The manager denied reports that the tiger had died because of poor conditions at the Tehran zoo. He said no other zoo inhabitant had glanders and all were in good health.
The last previous case of glanders at the Tehran Zoo happened 50 years ago, Elhami said.
“The Russian tiger that was brought to the country was itself a carrier of glanders and did not catch the disease in Iran,” Elhami told PressTV.
But in an interview with Itar-Tass, an unnamed official at the Russian trade office in Iran strongly denied the that a sick tiger had been sent to Iran.
“Two Amur tigers—a male and a female—presented by Russia to Iran in April 2010 were absolutely healthy at the moment of the transfer. The animals were closely examined by veterinarians and put under quarantine. Top-grade biologists examined them upon the arrival in Iran,” he said.
“Eight months have passed since the transfer. A sick animal accustomed to a rather cold climate would not have survived Tehran summer heat, especially in a tight zoo cage,” he said.
The tiger’s death at the Tehran Zoo in late December caused a scandal. The local media recalled that about $5 million had been spent on the tiger reproduction project in northern Iran. Iranian officials accused each other of the failure of the costly project.
Iranian environmentalists planned to restore the tiger population in the Caspian area, and the Amur tiger was the closest to the Mazandaran tiger by genetic measures.
Russian tigers were due to live in the Miankaleh nature reserve, but the Iranian media said the tiger living quarters there were still not ready, so the tigers were housed in Tehran.
The tiger that died in Tehran was named Amba and was active and healthy throughout the two years it spent at the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Zoo, a Russian zoo representative told Itar-Tass.
The two Russian tigers were sent to Iran in exchange for two Persian leopards.