Two Bengal tiger cubs breast fed for weeks by a Yangon housewife have died of heat and dehydration, a Myanmar newspaper reported on Thursday.
The black-striped, orange-brown cubs drew worldwide attention when Hla Htay, a mother of a baby boy, answered a plea for help from Yangon’s zoo and fed the cats three times a day after they were rejected by their tigress mother.
But the cubs -- a male and female born on March 17 -- did not take well to human milk and they grew weaker as temperatures soared in the hot season.
The male died on May 3, six days after his sister perished.
“The main causes of death were scorching weather and lack of milk from the natural mother,” Dr. Khin Maung Win of the Yangon Zoological Garden told the Myanmar-language Interview Journal.
“We did all we could to save them. They were kept in an air-conditioned room, but their livers could not accept human milk,” he said.
Three cubs were born at the zoo, but their mother killed one and refused to nurse the others. After bottle feeding failed, the zoo put out a call for breastfeeding mothers.
