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HJ Kitchener was a games warden in Malaya. This
passage describes how he acquired a new pet. "Would you like a baby tiger ?" some aborigines once
asked me in Pahang. "Yes, please," I replied quickly.
"I have tried to get one for many years." "We will
return in a few days," the leader of the aborigines
said. "We have found three tiger cubs in the jungle, one
female and two males. We will bring you a male." When
I reached my house, I told my wife about this visit. She
beamed at the thought of the new pet and started to work
out where it could be kept. Soon after this, I had to go
on a long journey and I was so busy that I completely
forgot about the aborigines and their promised gift.
Some days later, I returned to my bungalow, and noticed
that my wife did not look very pleased to see me. I
thought this was strange, but I was busy unpacking my
equipment, and putting the car in the garage. For a few
moments, my wife watched me without saying very much.
Then she reminded me of the aborigines' visit. "Come and
see what you have now !" she said, and took me to the
bathroom. I looked into a bundle of old woolen clothes
and saw a small, thin, and very dirty little animal in
the middle of them. "Is that the tiger cub you
mentioned ?" she asked me. I understood how she felt.
Certainly, this dirty little bundle was not at all what
we had expected, but we soon set to work on him. We
called him "Rimba" because this is the Malay word for
the dense, untouched jungle in which the aborigines
found him. We cleaned him up. Then, I examined him
carefully and saw that he was ill. There was something
wrong with his eyes and his soft fluffy coat. I knew
that he had not been fed properly since he had left his
mother. Somebody had probably given him condensed milk,
which is very bad for the stomach of young animals. We
gave Rimba what may seem a strange meal to you. First,
we made him swallow liquid paraffin with a special
medicine mixed with it. Then we started to give him a
bottle of milk with some fine white clay in it. After
about a week of this, he began to recover, and soon
learned to feed properly. When Rimba was five weeks
old, we gave him some meat jelly to eat, but it was
three more weeks before he would eat raw meat. At first,
he did not like it, but he quickly changed his mind and
settled down tot he normal food of a tiger. Our next
problem was to make sure that he had enough calcium to
allow his bones and teeth tog row properly. We chopped
up pieces of the neck of a wild boar, meat and bones
together, and gave these to him. At the end of two
months, he had grown a lot and needed plenty of
exercise. We gave him a longer playtime in the garden,
usually from about half past four until it grew dark. A
raised platform of planks was built in his room for him
to sleep on, and we gave him a large bath full of cold
water so that he could take a bath whenever he felt like
one. Even while he was very small, he liked to climb
into a small bowl, which we kept in the garden as a
birdbath. As he grew bigger, we bought larger baths for
him, until he had the largest we could find. Tigers do
not like heat, and often take baths in jungle streams.
In fact, a tiger cannot remain healthy without frequent
washing in clean, cold water. |
