Half lion, half tiger: Meet Liger cub Tsar

Tsar the liger cub, born from an extremely rare lion-tiger romance, is proving a hit for a traveling Russian zoo. Tsar has a tawny fur of a lion cub but covered in black stripes, was born while the zoo was on tour in southern Russia’s Rostov-on-Don region. Tsar's mother Princess, the zoo’s only tigress, had a difficult birth and has been unable to suckle him. She has given birth to a total of three liger cubs, but only Tsar has survived. Tsar is fed with goats milk about one litre a day. According to a researcher at Moscow’s Darwin Museum of natural history,hybrids like this are extremely rare – and generally they are weaker than lion cubs or ordinary young tigers, but if you take good care of them, they can grow up and live a long time although that male ligers are born sterile. Ligers, like tigons – cubs born to a lioness and a male tiger – can only be born in captivity. source