^ SO mad. official reviews are in: "Has the Oblivion logo on its tummy? The Champion of Cyrodiil?"
Tiger cub birth announcements are always a pretty big deal for me, for a lot of reasons. Note on the following is that it is stuff told to me by keepers, unless otherwise noted; people with additional info / alternative views are welcome to comment :]
Tigers are incredibly endangered animals. Their historical home ranges have been destroyed by colonialism in many forms, and in its modern iteration, it is usually extraction industries colluding with conservation orgs to exploit "protected" forests1. Indigenous communities who have spiritual + cultural respect for tigers, and whose traditional practices include allowing livestock takes by tigers, are displaced, and the tiger population collapses as its protectors are displaced and massive threats move in1. Injured and sick animals can't hunt their preferred prey, and turn to the more-dangerous but less-nimble targets of humans, or attack humans as their health condition causes pain and fear2 ... labeled a man-eater, the tiger is legal to kill.
In captivity, they're not easy to breed. Tigers are very solitary animals and generally maintain large territories that overlap slightly with adjacent territories at the border. They are distrustful of other tigers, but can become habituated to their neighbours by the scent left in the overlapping area. If they're sufficiently familiar with a neighbor, then if they actually encounter the other tiger they might not get in a fight and might breed. Or they might fight (due to unfamiliarity, pain, stress...), which may result in injury or death. They hold a grudge, and if they both survive these tigers will fight if they see each other again.
That above ecology makes captive tiger breeding really tough. You don't have a lot of space. There are a limited amount of tigers in captivity, and geneticists work to find the most genetically-different tigers to breed to prevent inbreeding and maintain genetic diversity -- so there are extremely few good pairs of tigers to breed. And remember, if attempts at breeding go poorly, the tigers will hate each other and that pairing won't be possible anymore. Some zoos have multiple tiger enclosures that they rotate individual tigers through to simulate the overlapping territory and giving them time to smell the other, and then have a dedicated tiger-meeting-area which is seldomly opened and is then observed by a team who set off a fire extinguisher to scare the tigers away from each other if they look like they're going to fight. which sounds like the most stressful job ever.
If they breed then the pregnancy might not succeed, if it does, the baby may not survive. Zoos generally do not immediately announce births, because newborn animals love to die, even with a team of veterinarians on-hand to give the little guys the best chances they can get.
So the announcement of a tiger cub is a big thing! The grumpy Champion of Cyrodiil is amazing news and I hope they grow up healthy and strong. Look at that determined expression. the hero of our time.
- Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-determination, Land, and a World in Common. Edited by Ashley Dawson, Fiore Longo, and Survival International.
- Baldus, R. D. A man-eating lion (Panthera leo) from Tanzania with a toothache. European Journal of Wildlife Research 52:59–62, 2006.