ASHLAND, Neb. (AP) - Vera prowled toward the brown bag, grabbed it with sharp teeth and trotted around her enclosure, a flash of orange on a gray January day.
Vera’s keepers use a variety of scents on the bag as part of her enrichment activities, but the 3-year-old tiger’s favorite is the perfume Chanel No. 5.
“They have very high tastes,” said Gary Pettit, superintendent of the Simmons Safari Park in Ashland. “Luckily, I know a few people who actually use that stuff and donated to us.”
Few people know about the six perfume-appreciating tigers housed in a 4-acre facility that’s closed to the public and is tucked away from high-traffic areas.
The facility, the only of its kind in the country, was finished in 2019. The Omaha World-Herald reports the space is meant to be as peaceful and comfortable as possible, a safe environment for the tigers to breed.
The four female and two male tigers are highly ranked genetically, said Jason Herrick, director of reproductive sciences at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium. The genetic ranking is based on how much or little each tiger is related to the population.
Diesel, a 3-year-old male born in Moscow and housed at the park, is ranked No. 1 in the country.
“Diesel’s parents were both born in the wild, so he had really unique genes that aren’t really represented in any other cats in the U.S.,” Herrick said.
Maintaining genetic diversity is key to long-term preservation and conservation of the species, he said.
The keepers and scientists caring for and studying the tigers are hopeful that there will soon be cubs at the park. But ultimately, it’s the tigers that decide if they will naturally breed with one another.
Detecting when two tigers are ready to breed can be tricky, said carnivore supervisor Carol Eager.
“We’ve spent much of the last year getting to know these cats very well so that we can hopefully read them correctly, and hopefully they have trust in us and don’t have to worry about us being in their background,” she said.
If a situation isn’t read correctly and two tigers are let into the same enclosure too soon, they may never breed, Eager said.
Sometimes, even when conditions are perfect, the tigers could use some scientific assistance. That’s where Herrick comes in.
Herrick and his team, in collaboration with scientists at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, were awarded a grant for the development of artificial insemination - a procedure rarely studied and seldom successful in tigers.
Though it’s an increasingly common practice among humans and livestock, artificial insemination has produced only four tiger cubs and works only about 10% of the time in the species, Herrick said.
Herrick hopes to increase the success rate to 50%.
“It’s this really valuable tool that we would like to have, but there’s still a lot of research and development to go into it before we’re getting to the point where we have 50% pregnancies or better,” he said.
No matter how successful, artificial insemination should never replace natural breeding, Herrick said.
“We should never get to the point of only doing (artificial insemination); it’s just to complement natural breeding,” he said. “There’s things the population needs that natural breeding can’t do.”
Herrick said he would be “thrilled” if his team could do 10 to 12 artificial insemination procedures on tigers in 2021, including a few in Ashland.
Pettit said cubs born at the facility could be moved to the zoo when safe from COVID-19.
In the meantime, the team of reproductive scientists and keepers works to ensure that tiger cubs will be seen for generations to come.
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