Why would a tiger not eat a piglet?
It’s probably confused. Saimai, a two-and-a-half-year-old Bengal tiger, suckled on a sow as a cub before growing up to live with a litter of piglets. The odd family live in a special “kinship to different families” unit at the Si Racha tiger farm in Thailand. But why the tiger’s natural urges don’t take over and see the piglets as lunch remains a little mysterious. “If this tiger was really suckled by a pig, it could well have quite a strange idea of what species it belongs to,” says Georgia Mason, a researcher in the animal behaviour research group at the University of Oxford. “There is the odd anecdote of hand-reared animals then wanting to mate with people.” Animals do have genetic predispositions for their most obvious behavioural traits, but their early experiences will also have an effect on their subsequent development. “There are stages in [some animals’] early lives when you can imprint them quite strongly on other species and you can alter their experience, which lasts a long
