KARACHI: The zoo has lost its last surviving member of the tiger family, it emerged on Friday.

Sources said that the old Bengal tigress died on Thursday after remaining seriously ill for some time. The facility is now left with two lionesses, a lion and a pair of lions.

“She was one of the oldest members of the zoo family. In recent weeks, she had developed multiple health complications,” a zoo official said, adding that the big cat was provided the much-needed treatment, but she couldn’t recover.

“In recent months, we were able to save an old lioness whose condition had deteriorated to an extent that we thought it would die,” he said.

The zoo director wasn’t available for comments.

The sources said the Bengal tigress had a solitary existence for a long time. Other members of the zoo tiger family, including an imported pair and a male big cat brought in from Lahore through an animal exchange programme, died over the years.

The sources shared that while the zoo had kept several pairs of Bengal tigers in different times, the facility had never seen a birth in the species in decades.

“The lions’ case was a bit different. There had been a few births in this species but the babies either couldn’t survive or went missing,” shared a zoo official on the condition of anonymity, hoping that the cubs recently born to a zoo lioness would survive.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2024