Tuesday, May 4, 2010

It's been a week of some weird and some wonderful.
Strange things have crossed my path lately and I've found that this is what holds my interest.
Strange and Weird and sometimes Wonderful.  I love those things.


When these pictures were first emailed to me, they were attached to the cutest, albeit sad, little story about a mother piggie who passed on after giving birth to these babies and a tiger mom who lost her little kids, too, was depressed and needed to bond.
I fell in love with the the total implausibility of it all!
It seemed so incredible:   They wrapped these little piglets in tiger skins and presented them to the Tiger mom as her own.  And she took to them.  She didn't want to eat them, but to love them.  Too beautiful to be true!  But, here was picture proof!
Well, turns out, it was too good to be true.
The photos are real, but the story is not exactly.

As it happens, this sort of intermingling of species is not at all unusual at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, where "creating successful relationships with animals of different species" is something of a guiding principle. The facility, more accurately described as part zoo and part circus, boasts offbeat attractions like basketball-playing elephants, "lady crocodile wrestlers," and a petting zoo where customers can bottle-feed baby tigers with their own bare hands. Visitors have reported seeing tigers, pigs, and dogs all housed together within the same enclosure, with sows nursing tiger cubs and tigresses nursing piglets "adorned in tiger-print costumes."
The costumes are strictly for show, by the way. The mother tiger pictured above, who has been photographed on other occasions suckling piglets au naturel, was herself nursed by a pig in infancy and apparently regards the other species as family, not prey.

Ah well, it's still a beautiful thought.

2 comments:

Paige said...

wow. That is nuts. I am glad to know the real story. What a confusing reality for those guys.

Bonbon Oiseau said...

you're killing me ivuh heyuh.