So I'm sitting here with a glass of water, shortly to go on to grape juice – not quite the same as watching Little Dorritt with a glass of wine but there you go.
And on a more pleasant note - in a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.
After recovering from the delivery, the mother tiger suddenly started to decline, although physically she was fine. The vets felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. They decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.
After checking with many other zoos across the country, the bad news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The vets therefore decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species will take on the care of a different species. The only orphans that could be found quickly were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. What happened next....
