Agnes has arrived!

Tigers are the largest members of the cat family, excluding some prehistoric relatives. These striped big cats are native to Asia, where their original range was quite vast, from modern-day Turkey to Indonesia, and from Siberia to southern India. Within this vast area, tigers lived in a variety of habitats and adapted to local conditions, which led to the emergence of different regional types, or subspecies, within the species.

Today, we distinguish between nine subspecies of tigers (although there are other opinions), but the Caspian tiger, the Bali tiger, and the Javan tiger have unfortunately become extinct. The best-known subspecies is perhaps the Bengal tiger, which is also native to India. Shere Khan, a character in Kipling’s famous collection of short stories, “The Jungle Book”, was a Bengal tiger. Other subspecies include the Indochinese tiger (formerly known as the Corbett’s tiger), the Malayan tiger, the South China tiger, the Sumatran tiger, and the Siberian tiger.

At our Zoo, the public first saw a tiger in 1868, and over time we have exhibited several subspecies, such as Bengal tigers (also known as royal tigers), Javan or Sunda tigers, and Siberian tigers. Our first Siberian tiger arrived in 1937, at a time when very few zoos were working with this subspecies. After World War II, we resumed keeping Siberian tigers in 1971.

It is worth noting that the name “Siberian” can be somewhat misleading. These animals are not native to Siberia in the strictest sense, but rather even further east, in the Russian Far East, in the Amur and Ussuri river regions. For this reason, Siberian tigers are also referred to as Amur tigers, and in the Czech Republic, where our new tiger came from, they are called the “Ussuri tiger” (tygr ussurijský).

Agnes, who recently arrived, was born at the zoo in Hluboká nad Vltavou, Czech Republic, on 5 July 2021, and spent the first years of her life there. At two and a half years old, it was time for her to “leave” her parental home. She came to us as part of the tiger breeding program under the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, with the goal of eventually being paired with a male, with whom she could form a breeding pair in the future.

At our Zoo, the first tiger cub was born in 1886, and the most recent such joyous event was in 2013. Since then, there has been no further tiger breeding, as our animals were already quite old, and although they lived much longer than their counterparts in the wild, they have since passed away. Now, we hope to continue showcasing and breeding Siberian tigers with new, young breeding animals for conservation purposes. The future mother tiger has already arrived, in the form of Agnes.