Two adorable Amur tiger cubs have made their first outdoor appearance at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, captivating visitors with their playful antics.
The three-month-old cubs, named Rusty (a male) and Yuki (a female), were filmed enjoying their new surroundings alongside their protective mother, Yana.
In the heartwarming video, the cubs are seen playfully tumbling, pouncing, and climbing trees in their enclosure.
Yana watches over them with care, offering a loving paw around her cubs as they explore. The footage shows the cubs’ boundless energy and curiosity as they engage with their environment.
A particularly charming moment occurs when one of the cubs leaps from a fallen tree, tumbling into its sibling on the ground.
In another playful interaction, one of the cubs attempts to leap onto Yana, but she responds gently with a swipe of her paw, sending the cub rolling away in a tender display of motherly care.
Amur tigers, one of the world’s most endangered species, are the focus of an important European breeding program aimed at conservation.
Once teetering on the edge of extinction due to excessive hunting in the 1930s, the population of Amur tigers was reduced to just 20 to 30 individuals.
However, thanks to ongoing conservation efforts, their status was upgraded from “critically endangered” to “endangered” in 2007 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Today, approximately 540 Amur tigers remain in the wild.
The primary threats to Amur tigers are habitat loss and human activity, including illegal logging, which destroys their forests and disrupts their prey’s food supply.
The Russian Far East, home to many of these tigers, faces persistent issues with illegal logging, despite government measures to curb deforestation.
The timber mafia’s role in illegal logging, highlighted in documentaries such as Dark Forest, underscores the high-level corruption that continues to fuel this problem, further threatening the survival of this majestic species.
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