The Bali tiger was never held in captivity?

Almiquí

Almiquí

Active Member
I'm doing some research on tiger populations, pure curiosity. I found out that Zootierliste doesn't have any data on Bali tigers. That left me wondering if Bali tigers were never held in any zoo.
There are records of the Javan tiger in eleven facilities in Europe according to Zootierliste, and Sumatran tigers are found in several zoos. Why not Bali tigers?
 
Almiquí said:
Why not Bali tigers?
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1) ZTL is only as accurate as the edits made by people, and the records available to them, allow it to be; the presence of historical holdings that have gone unnoticed or even entirely unrecorded cannot be ruled out.

2) The Bali Tiger was exterminated significantly earlier (1930s) than were the Caspian (1970s) and Javan (c.1987), and as such was theoretically available to zoological collections for less time.

3) It is likely populations were very low even when extant during the 19th century.
 
Pertinax said:
If you search the internet there are two(?) photos of what are reputed to be two Bali tigers in a circus with a lady trainer. No idea of where this was or date though.
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Thanks! I found them! According to the post in Tumblr they were two alleged Bali tigers owned by the Ringling Brothers Circus, around 1915, but this information is very unreliable

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It would be very interesting if these photographs are genuinely Bali Tiger, as this would quite literally make them the only photographic images of living individuals that I am aware of; otherwise, to the best of my knowledge there are merely a dozen or so photographs of freshly-killed animals.

Mind you, I reckon the odds are good that even if these two animals were not Bali Tiger, they were Javan and thus still noteworthy.
 
I'm sure that Bali tigers would have been held in captivity, perhaps not in the context of a Western Zoological garden, but historically within the menajeries of the Balinese aristocracy and Royal family.
 
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