Arthur

Male Tiger

Born 1/1/96 Died 8/7/18

Rescued 9/28/11

Arthur is social with his keepers, however he keeps his guard up at times. He settled in soon enough as it is hard to resist the charm of the volunteers who bring treats to their newest charges.

Arthur loves his brother Andre dearly and the two are often found cuddled up in the same den or lounging together in one of their pools. Arthur is the dominant tiger in the group and shows off his fierce attitude at dinner time. We can only guess the feeding situation of their previous home, but from they way these three tigers act it seems they may have had to fight over food at times.

All three tigers are so aggressive when it comes to food they have to be separated. While each has their own feeding lock out that they are fed in, if they are not separated into different enclosures as well they will run back and forth through the enclosures to steal one another’s food resulting in fights.

Hopefully they will one day understand that food is plentiful here and there is no need for a frenzy when it comes to dinner time.
Arthur, Andre and Amanda were born in 1996 in New Jersey to be used as pay-to-play photo props.  It never makes sense to breed more cubs to raise money to feed last year’s cats, and the New Jersey facility fell into disrepair and then was shut down after USDA revoked their license following a tiger escape.

In 2003, Wild Animal Orphanage took in the 24 tigers, but big cats have big appetites and by 2010 the Wild Animal Orphanage was in bankruptcy.

It took over a year to find permanent homes for all of the cats because it is hard to place a big cat who will cost $10,000 per year in food and vet care.

Amazingly, an anonymous donor couple who had known these tigers as cubs fortuitously stepped in to fund the ongoing care of these three lucky tigers who came to Big Cat Rescue in 2011.

Update 4/10/17

Arthur hasn’t been eating well and has been acting strange toward Andre and Amanda.  Today Dr. Justin will draw blood and do other diagnostics to see what we can do for this 21 year old tiger.

To see all of Arthur’s tees, tanks, mugs, necklaces, phone and iPad cases and more go to: https://catrescue.myshopify.com/search?type=product&q=arthur

8/5/18  Arthur was found this evening with his foot caught in the threshold of the entryway to the tunnel between two of his enclosures. Once freed it appeared as though he injured his rear leg/ankle and he was not weight-bearing. Dr. Justin came in to sedate and examine him. We did not see any obvious fractures on the X-rays but will be sending them out to specialists to analyze. He may have suffered nerve, tendon or ligament damage. He was given large doses of anti-inflammatories and pain medications and will recover in the transport overnight. 

8/7/18 Arthur was euthanized by Dr Wynn after twisting his ankle, making it impossible for him to walk. The bones were not broken, but there was severe tissue damage and no path for recovery given his size.  He’d been declining in every way for months and had gone blind and was on copious amounts of pain killers.  We had been begging him a couple times a day to eat.  Even though this injury happened rather unexpectedly, since he’d been navigating his cage blind pretty well, we knew we were very close to the end.  

Read more about the rescue of three tigers from Texas here.