ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Inbreeding Threatens White Tiger

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 2 2000 (IPS) - Their blue eyes and brown stripes make them star attractions at zoos in the country, but India’s white tigers are dying fast because of unscientific inbreeding, say wildlife experts.

When 14 of these big cats died last month in the Nandankanan Biological Park and Zoo in eastern coastal Orissa state, which has the world’s biggest white tiger breeding programme, no one could say that zoo authorities had not been forewarned. The park is now left with only 19 white tigers.

Officials have provisionally diagnosed the cause of the deaths as ‘trypanosomiasis’, a vector-borne parasitic disease found in the region and which may have spread into the park from stray cattle.

“White tigers are an aberration. Nature does not support them and left alone they would have gradually been phased out,” Brigadier (retired) Ranjit Talwar of the World Wide Fund (WWF)’s Tiger Conservation Programme told IPS.

Wildlife experts fault the three decades of incestuous inbreeding of the big cats carried out in the country’s zoos to increase their numbers.

According to Talwar, genetically de-pigmented individuals and albinos turn up every now and then in different animal species such as cheetahs, leopards and peacocks. This process also explains the origin of the famous white elephant.

While they are prized and even venerated, it is folly to subject them to unscientific inbreeding, say the experts.

India’s Environment Minister T. R. Baalu admitted Monday in Parliament that excessive inbreeding could have been a cause for the white tiger deaths that has made national news headlines.

The minister also blamed negligence and lack of funds for the proper upkeep of zoos and natural sanctuaries in the country.

Baalu admitted in a statement that over the last five years Indian zoos have lost 175 lions and 226 tigers while the wildlife sanctuaries lost 46 lions and 226 tigers during the same period.

The government’s own tiger experts have long warned against inbreeding. “Specific programmes to rapidly and effectively eliminate inbreeding are needed if the white tiger is to survive,” says one of them, A.K. Malhotra, curator at the National Zoological Park in the Indian capital.

Malhotra is prominent among a group of experts who have been unsuccessfully advocating a stop to the practice of breeding white tigers within their own blood line through inbreeding.

Instead, they are for the slower process of “out-breeding” in which white tigers are mated with normal yellow tigers to produce “heterozygous” individuals. The new specie, though yellow, would still carry the recessive white genes and be capable of producing healthy white progeny.

“It is important for all zoos involved in breeding white tigers to first build up stocks of heterozygous tigers through unrelated parents to facilitate breeding, preferably through artificial insemination,” says Malhotra.

At present too many of the white tigers born in India’s zoos have arched backs, crossed eyes, crooked necks and defective paws. Experts blame unscientific breeding practices for this.

Talwar traces unscientific breeding in the country to the early 1950s when Martand Singh, the then ruler of the former princely state of Rewa in central India, captured a white tiger cub while on a big game expedition.

Singh named the cub Mohan and later used it in a programme of intensive inbreeding which led to a large number of still births and deformed progeny.

But there were enough healthy survivors that went on to become the progenitors of half of the world’s now surviving stock of about 100 white tigers.

World demand for white tigers grew after Mohini, a tigress sired by Mohan through his daughter, was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1960 and presented to the National Zoo in Washington.

Mohini became a celebrity and was even visited by then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. But even she was mated to her son Ramana and their healthier descendants are draws in U.S. zoos today.

According to another tiger expert L.A.K. Singh, at the WWF in Delhi, white tigers can only live in zoos. This is because their colouring is accompanied by traits that make them unsuitable for present-day tiger habitats in tropical jungles.

Singh believes that their white colour is a throwback to a time when tigers lived in cold countries with abundant snow which offered better camouflaging. Less well-known species are the black- hued tigers in Burma, Bangladesh and the southwest of India.

Obsession with white tigers and other colour aberrations, of which there are many, could, says Singh, affect ongoing efforts to protect normal tigers.

“This can cause the conservation-supporting public to lose interest in the ordinary tiger whose black stripes on a yellow background was selected by nature,” he points out.