July 7, 2006
Yesterday the six-week-old cubs had another visit from the vet staff. The first visit a month ago was very brief, and they just got a quick once over. This time the vets took a more thorough look. In addition to checking their eyes and ears and listening to their heartbeats, we also gave the cubs their first shots and took poop samples and blood samples. The vets will run a number of routine tests on the blood, but they are also hoping to study how the vaccines work in tigers.
If you have a cat at home, it is pretty similar to the tigers here. Both kinds of cats are vulnerable to the same diseases, so they get the same kinds of vaccines. No one knows for sure just how long it takes for tiger cubs to be protected by the vaccines so the doctors here going to try and find out. To do that, they will be taking a little bit of blood from each of the cubs every couple of weeks until we know they are carrying a titer, which means they have the antibodies to protect them from certain diseases. Or we will at least take blood samples as long as the cubs will let us! They were very brave about getting the shots, and everyone looks healthy.
Each of them gained about a pound and a half in the past week, which is just about right. One of the girls weighs ten pounds, the other is 12 pounds, and the boy is 13 pounds. Everyone has teeth now as well! We have seen the cubs sampling some of mom's dinner on the cub cam, and it won't be long now before she will start to wean them. But for right now, it's mostly milk for them.
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