NINE LIVES

Source: Weekender Magazine, Page 12, May 27 2004
By: Anastasia Hackett

For most people rolling around with a tiger is the stuff of nightmares but for three local blokes it’s a dream come true. They chew the fat with Anastasia Hackett.

Blue-eyed baby tiger triplets cuddle up in the corner while their three surrogate fathers discuss their antics with pride in their eyes. “You’ve pretty much got to keep a 24 hour watch for the first five months,” says supervisor Robbie Doyle. “It’s just like having a baby – three of them,” adds senior handler Giles Clark. Then manager Bruce Murdock chimes in, “they’re better than a baby, though. You can kick them out earlier.”

This strange little family is the latest addition to Australia Zoo. In an effort to begin a breeding program, the zoo adopted three two-week-old Sumatran cubs to join the three-six-month old Bengals already in the tiger compound. “We consider these guys as the luckiest and most enriched cats in captivity because they are constantly stimulated and receive really hands-on training,” says Robbie. Hands-on is almost an understatement. Robbie has been virtually living with the new cubs since they arrived five weeks ago. Someone has to be there around the clock for all the traditional parental duties – supply five feeds a day, sterilise bottles, take them out for exercise, entertain them with toys, break up fights and, of course clean up.

“You’ve got to do a lot of down-time with them so they basically get bored with you over a period of time so when you walk out the gate you are not a novelty,” explains Bruce. It’s a strategy he’s spent more than a decade perfecting in zoos and at Dreamworld’s tiger island where all three trainers worked before moving to the Sunshine Coast. It’s not the sort of job that comes with an instruction manual. “It’s more a matter of people tried it and died and refined the technique from there,” says Bruce with a spooky sort of seriousness. But he is quick to add that the most dangerous thing about tigers is their fear and they feel threatened.

All the guys have had a few near misses. “They are never going to be tame. They are always going to have their teeth and their claws and their instinct. You’re not going to take the wild out of them, they’re still tigers,” says Giles.

The wild is not something these guys wish to remove in fact the main focus of their project is to save it. Only about 4000 tigers remain in their natural habitat. Three of the eight tiger sub-species are now extinct and only a few hundred Sumatran tigers remain.

While the Australia Zoo breeding program aims to sustain this endangered group, it will never be possible for the tigers born in captivity to be released into the wild. That’s why a crucial part of the programs like the Lifeforce project in India where Giles previously worked. “If we can inspire just 10 per cent of the people that come through here to put back into projects in the wild and change their attitudes toward conservation, we’ll be a success,”says Giles.

Some of the things they want the average consumer to recognise is that some timber and paper products used in Australia are logged, sometimes illegally, from traditional tiger habitats. “This is not just the tigers, the elephants and the pandas, it’s me, you and your grandchildren,” says Giles.