Both the white tiger and the white lion are special colors in the big cat, and the white tiger is relatively rare and rare.
The white tiger is a variant of the Bengal tiger, the normal Bengal tiger is orange, while the white tiger lacks brown melanin, so it is pinkish white, with chocolate stripes and ice blue eyes. The white tiger is not a tiger with albinism, which is pure white and has pink eyes. The White Tiger trait is the result of being controlled by a pair of recessive genes that may have occurred from a genetic mutation hundreds of years ago.
The first document in history to describe the white tiger in detail is the Animal World by the Great Anatomy Home Weiye, which mentions that in 1820 a white tiger was exhibited in London, which is the earliest white tiger we know. Later, the white tiger has been reported in many parts of South Asia, but the most is in the Rewa region of Madhya Pradesh (present-day Bandagarh National Park).
In 1915, Maharaja Rewa captured a male white tiger in the wild and raised it. The white tiger was made into a specimen after his death in 1920 and dedicated to King George V and is now on display in the British Museum.
In 1951, the successor Maharaja reva (the son of the previous Maharaja reva) captured a 9-month-old white tiger alive, and its orange mother and three siblings were shamelessly shot by the hunters. This little male white tiger named Mohan was raised because of its rare body color.
People have mated Mohan with female tigers of normal body color many times, and the result is, without exception, orange cubs. It wasn't until 1958 that Mohan was backcrossed with his daughter Radha (which is obviously immoral from a human perspective) and finally gave birth to four white cubs, one male and three females. Now all the white tigers in the zoos of the world are the offspring of this mating.
To get a white tiger, both parents need to carry the recessive white tiger gene, which occurs only 1 in 100,000 times in its natural state. However, more than a hundred of India's hundreds of captive tigers are now white tigers, and because white tigers are unique in appearance and more popular, zoos are more willing to breed white tigers.
Long-term and repeated inbreeding has led to serious health problems for white tigers in zoos, including declining fertility, high mortality, vision deficiencies, concave backs and twisted necks. Therefore, animal protection organizations have long called on zoos to stop breeding white tigers.
White tigers are said to grow faster and have larger adults, with male white tigers aged 2-3 years old having 200-230 kg. Due to the lack of hidden colors, white tigers are difficult to survive in the wild, and now India's wilderness tourism is very developed, and thousands of tourists go deep into the tiger habitat every year to shoot, and have never photographed wild white tigers.
There is also a special white tiger called the snow tiger, which is almost pure white, and the stripes are very light, which can only be seen when facing the light. Zoos in many countries, such as the United States, Mexico and the Czech Republic, use white tigers to continue inbreeding and obtain snow tigers.
The white lion is a color variant of lions that is more common in South Africa, especially in the Timbavati region. The white lion was first recorded in 1938, but it is said to have existed for centuries.
The white lion is also not a lion with albinism, but unlike the white tiger, the white lion gene and the gene that causes the lion to develop albinism are the same pair, the former is produced by a weakening recessive mutation of the latter. The white lion gene makes the lion's body color lighter, but it is not necessarily pure white, and can be varied between light brown, gold, and white. Moreover, white lions can survive in the wild.
White lions are prized for their rarity, and from the 1970s onwards, people began to systematically capture white lions from the wild and brown lions carrying white lion genes (whose parents were white lions), resulting in more than a decade of not seeing white lions in the wild from 1994 onwards.
The Global White Lion Conservation Trust believes that the white lion gene is an important part of the genetic diversity of south African lions. So the foundation is committed to reintroducing white lions into the wild. Since the white lion gene is far more common than the white tiger gene, and the inbreeding problem of captive white lions is not as serious as the latter, the foundation found a group of healthy white lions that have not undergone inbreeding, and in 2004 they were released into the wild to mate with normal lions, so that the offspring carry the white lion gene. When two lions carrying the white lion gene mate, there is a certain chance of giving birth to white lion pups.
The Foundation's efforts have been so successful that since 2006, white lion cubs have been born almost every year in the Timbavati region. In 2014, white lion cubs also appeared in Kruger Park. These white lions live in the same group as normal lions and have the ability to hunt alone, and the hunting efficiency can reach the same level as the latter.
This is a male white lion cub born in 2015, and by 2017, it has grown to two years old, and it looks very confident among the brothers of the same age.
This is a female white lion born in 2009, who has grown up and lives with normal lions in the lion herd.
This is the three-year-old male white lion photographed this year, wandering with his brother.
Today, the White Lion has become a flagship, shouldering the responsibility of awakening attention to lion conservation in South Africa and the ecological protection of the Greater Kruger region.
White lions are more viable in the wild than white tigers, possibly because the overall hue in lion habitats is relatively light, and the adverse effects of white are relatively less so great. And lions live in groups, and even if they can't catch prey, they can get replenishment from their companions. However, the most common white member of the feline family is the white domestic cat sheltered by humans, such as the following goods.