People want to know if the white tiger that we see in many zoos are albino tigers. The answer is that they are not albino tigers. Albino tigers would be pure white with pink eyes. The white tiger that you see in zoos have chalk-white coats, iced-blue eyes and chocolate-coloured stripes. My reference book Wild Cats of the World, states that this phenotype is due to “a pair of recessive genes, which probably resulted from a mutation that occurred about a hundred years ago”.
The genetic mutation is called leucism. Clearly, in the wild a white coat would be a hindrance to stalking and hunting because it’s too visible. In my view, there are no white tigers in the wild. The last white tiger in the wild in existence was a cub called Mohan and he is the foundation white tiger of all the white tigers you see in the world today in captivity.
So, there’s no problem about the white coat being a hindrance to survival of a true wild tiger. I don’t believe that there are any albino tigers in the world because I’ve just stated there are no white tigers in the wild and I have also stated that all the white tigers in zoos are not albino tigers.
Some people ask Google if albino tigers are rare but it’s a pointless question because they’ve achieved the ultimate state of rarity: extinction!
According to one website, there are 200 white tigers in captivity and they are the result of nine generations of inbreeding from that single foundation cat, Mohan. A sad state of affairs and one that many visitors to zoos are unaware of when they admire a magnificent white tiger. They are unaware of the congenitally disfigured white tigers that they never see.
The white tiger you see in zoos are basically selectively bred like a purebred domestic cats and for that reason you could say that they are almost a “breed of tiger”. This is not something you would normally say because a tiger is a species of cat but because of long-standing human intervention the white tiger is an abnormal creation.
There was some talk about introducing the white tiger into the wild but it appears to have fizzled out. They would quite possibly have failed disastrously because it would have been a bit like putting a domestic cat confined to the home into the urban jungle in the hope and expectation that they would survive. They almost certainly wouldn’t.
Mike Tyson’s pet white Bengal tiger tried to eat his neighbor’s dogs!
