There has been a loud debate in recent weeks since the male tiger died about the quality of management at Tehran’s Eram zoo. The debate grew louder after several big cats had to be put down when they were found to have a disease communicable to humans.
Russia presented a pair of Amur tigers to the Tehran Zoo last April. The male tiger died in December. Zoo officials said then that the animals were probably ill before they left Russia.
The Russian Trade Mission in Tehran categorically denied that. Both tigers were absolutely healthy when they were turned over to Iran, it said. Both underwent strict veterinarian checks and were quarantined. During transportation to Iran, the animals were accompanied by highly qualified biologists, the Russian side said. Moreover, the animals were used to a relatively cold climate and would not have survived the Tehran summer heat—locked up in a cage, rather than in a spacious enclosure—had they been ill, it said.
Iranian ecologists had been planning to reintroduce the tiger population, which became extinct as a result of hunting, to the Caspian zone. The Amur tiger is genetically a close kin of the Mazandaran tiger species.
The Russian tigers were to have been released in the Miyan Kaleh nature reserve, but there were no enclosures for them when the animals arrived despite $5 million dollars envisaged for the animals’ upkeep. As a result, they were taken to the Eram zoo.
In exchange for the two tigers, Iran presented Russia with two leopards of a type that became extinct in Russia’s North Caucasus early in the 20th Century.