Artificial Insemination Kills Young Female Tiger.

Scientists and researchers in Colorado were breeding her in an attempt to continue the species in an allegedly safer manner* than tiger-on-tiger natural insemination.  Lousy move.

“In the moments after she passed, I approached Savelii’s side to touch her as she slipped from this world to the next. I thought to myself: ‘This is a tiger.’ ‘This is a tiger lying here,'” Bob Chastain, president and CEO of Cheyenne Mountain Zoo wrote.

“I looked at her long and amazing body, her huge 2-inch-long white teeth, and her pie-plate-sized paws. I saw her hair was shaved for the surgery site. There, on her skin, were the stripes that were once hair. The same stripes you see on their fur translate all the way through the skin. They read in tones for black and a blush pink. I don’t know why that mattered in that moment, except that animals and nature are amazing and magical.”

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*  “Natural breeding for tigers can be precarious, because the breeding behaviors are often aggressive, including the male biting the back of the female’s neck,” Chastain explained. “[W]e decided on artificial insemination as the safest way to safeguard this amazing species of Amur tiger from extinction.”