3 tigers very ill at Chinese zoo where 11 starved

BEIJING — Zookeepers are scrambling to save three seriously ill Siberian tigers at a cash-strapped zoo in northeastern China where 11 of the big cats starved to death recently.




The three tigers were shedding fur, had lost their appetites and were listless, the official Xinhua News Agency reported late Monday.



Eleven of the 30 Siberian tigers at the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo starved to death in the past three months, having been fed nothing but chicken bones as the facility ran into financial trouble, according to reports last week, although a zoo manager said unspecified diseases killed the animals.



Staff at the zoo who answered the phone Tuesday refused to answer questions or give their names. They referred calls to the local Communist Party press office, where an official, Zhang Qingyang, confirmed that three tigers were still very sick.



"We can only say that three of the tigers are in bad health right now, and we are actively working to save them," Zhang said but wouldn't elaborate. "Should we fail to save them, we'd let the public know right away."



After news broke of the mass tiger deaths last week, the local government pledged 7 million yuan ($1.03 million) to help save the remaining animals.



Since then, staff have cleaned and installed heating in the cold, damp tiger cages, given the animals nutritional supplements and started feeding them 6 pounds (2.5 kilograms) of beef and two hens per day, Xinhua said.



Siberian tigers are one of the world's rarest species, with an estimated 300 left in the wild, 50 in China. But more than 5,000 are held captive on farms and wildlife parks across China.



Several other protected animal species have also died at the zoo this year, including a red-crowned crane, four stump-tailed macaques, a rhesus monkey and a brown bear, Xinhua said over the weekend.

SMALL DOGS ORIGINATED IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Small dogs the world over can all trace their ancestry back to the Middle East, where the first diminutive canines emerged more than 12,000 years ago.

A new study, which appears in BMC Biology, focused on a single gene responsible for size in dogs. Researchers found that the version of the gene IGF1 that is a major determinant of small size in dogs probably originated as a result of domestication of the Middle Eastern gray wolf, which also happens to be smaller than many other wolves.

In terms of which came first, big dogs or small dogs, the answer is now the former.

"Archaeological studies suggest that ancient (dog) remains found in Belgium, Germany and Western Russia, which date to 13,000-31,000 years ago, were most similar in body size to the Great Dane, while those from the Middle East dating to about 12,000 years ago were most similar to a small terrier," lead author Melissa Gray told Discovery News.

For the study, Gray, a researcher in the Laboratory of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleagues traced the evolutionary history of the IGF1 gene. To do so, they surveyed a large sample of gray wolf populations, other wild members of the Canidae family, and numerous breeds of dogs.

Gray and her team first confirmed that all domesticated dogs trace their heritage back to gray wolves. She indicated the jury is still out as to when and where the world's first dog -- of any size -- emerged.

All small dogs, normally weighing 20 pounds or less, share the variant of IGF1 also found in Middle Eastern gray wolves, the scientists discovered. This means the gene must have surfaced early in the history of small dogs, but after dogs in general were first domesticated.

The DNA studies, combined with the archaeological record, then suggest that at least 12,000 years ago, the first domesticated small dogs entered the world, with humans playing a major role in the process.