Tiger exhibit opens at Six Flags

Tiger exhibit opens at Six Flags

By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
MediaNews Group
Created: 07/11/2009 02:30:26 AM PDT

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It wasn’t a typical ribbon-cutting.

It involved no giant scissors — just giant claws and teeth — when Six Flags Discovery Kingdom’s Odin’s Temple of the Tiger exhibit officially opened Thursday.

It took some coaxing to get 10-month-old cubs Akasha and Nalin to cut through the banner stretched across the steps below the new tiger exhibit’s entrance, which they preferred to duck under. They needed no such encouragement to frolic and lounge among the rocks and waterfalls of their new enclosure.

The authentic-looking faux boulders are heated in winter and cooled in summer, park spokespeople said.

“It’s like Club Med for tigers,” park spokesman “Captain” Lee Munro said.

The new exhibit also provides a fenced-in, glass-fronted viewing area where guests can watch the cats enjoy those features.

Having taken a few weeks longer than expected to acclimate to their new surroundings, the big cats’ new facility’s grand opening was postponed until Thursday. Members of the press were treated to a demonstration of some of the tigers’ behaviors around which a new and improved tiger show has been developed, Munro said.

“The old show was more of a demonstration,” he said. “Now we’ve added music and characters, and it’s more of an actual production.”

The new interactive show is 20 minutes long.

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