Tallinn Zoo's Pootsman the Siberian tiger dies
Pootsman the Siberian tiger, who recently returned to Tallinn Zoo, has passed away following an operation Monday morning. Pootsman was 13 and had been suffering from a large tumor, and had not been expected to have much longer left to live even if the operation had been successful.
Pootsman had returned to Tallinn Zoo with his mate Danuta last month, after several years in various other zoos in Europe. The pair were housed in the appropriately named "Tiger valley" exhibit at the zoo, a new development.
While veterinary surgeons removed a malignant tumor on Monday morning, he suffered complications after the operation while recovering from anaesthesia and had to be resuscitated – after half an hour of trying, this effort proved sadly fruitless.
Aleksandr Semjonov, chief veterinarian at Tallinn Zoo and chief veterinarian of the Tartu-based Estonian University of Life Sciences (Maaülikool) veterinary clinic, said that everything possible had been done for Pootsman, adding that: "The extent of the malignant tumor revealed by the CT scan was large and the prognosis for Pootsman's life was short."
"Without removal of the tumour, there would have been additional pain," Semjonov added.
It was the consensus of the veterinary committee to give Pootsman a chance. The operation, which was performed on the first night, was long and unfortunately the animal's body could not withstand it," he explained.
Pootsman, was born at Moscow Zoo in May 2011 in a litter of Siberian tigers taken from the wild, and was relocarted to Tallinn Zoo in December 2012 where he lived for six years.
Pootsman did not have a mate at the Tallinn Zoo, so the European Endangered Species Program (EEP) coordinator opted to loan him to the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums (EAZA) Species Conservation Breeding and Reproduction Program, from the end of 2018. He went to to Zlín-Lešná Zoo in the Czech Republic, where he fathered three cubs, in 2019.
He was then at the coordinator's decision sent to Parco Natura Viva Zoo in Italy, where he fathered three more cubs, in 2020.
From 2021 onwards, Pootsman lived in the zoo in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with Danuta, a mother tiger named Vita, who was his third mate.
Pootsman also lived to be a grandfather – his cubs in turn had had seven offspring as of 2023.
The Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), known in Estonian as the Amur tiger, is highly endangered and only numbers into the hundreds in the wild, with its distribution in the Russian far east and also northeastern China.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Merili Nael
