White Bengal Tiger

The white Bengal Tiger has creamy-white coat with chocolate stripes and light blue eyes. Male white tigers weigh between 180 and 260 kg; females reach the weigh of 200 kg. It is not a separate subspecies, but a color variety of the Bengal Tiger. Other tiger subspecies don’t occur in white colors. Even Siberian Tigers living in taiga never come in white. White or Snow cubs are born only when both parents have a gene responsible for such coloration. The parents may be of a common reddish color, but to give birth to the white offspring, they should be carriers of the recessive gene.

White tigers were noticed in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Himalaya, Burma, and the Bay of Bengal – throughout the common habitat of the Bengal Tiger. For centuries, white tigers were considered to be sacred animals, but it didn’t stop humans from killing them. The white Bengal Tiger is very rare in the wild, but it became quite common in zoos of the USA, Europe, and Asia. All captive white Bengal Tigers are the offspring of a single white male caught in India long time ago. He was bred to his own daughter to produce white cubs. Inbreeding was the only way to promote the gene that gives the unusual coat coloration. White Bengal Tigers were even mixed to Siberian Tigers to get larger offspring.

It soon found out that inbreeding leads to serious health defects or breeding depressions in the white Bengal Tiger. Though large and beautiful, white tigers were not long-lived. They suffer from joint problems and cannot reproduce. In their natural habitat, white Bengal Tigers have a less chance of surviving, because they lack camouflage allowing them to stalk the prey and attack suddenly. There are probably no white tigers in the wild at all. In the captive population of white tigers, this unnatural characteristic is maintained for commercial purposes.

The future of the Bengal Tiger with white coat doesn’t look bright, because the population of the Bengal Tiger is too fragmented to maintain healthy without inbreeding. Though a white Bengal Tiger can be born through inbreeding, in small fragmented populations the chances of preserving recessive genes are very low.