Game of Big Cat Love

Anyone who owns cats truly understands why the term "Sex kitten" is applied to sexy human females. It is hard to resist a cat's seductive power. Once a writer said: "One either loves cats, or does not know them". Let's rather hope this is so -better than believe there are such hard-hearted humans who are not touched by the seductive power of a cat!

Watching the game of love being played by the biggest cats of all is a great previledge, for which I am truly grateful. Cathay started showing signs of oestrus a couple of days ago-allowing TigerWoods to smell her rear etc. Yesterday afternoon, she was at her most seductive self.

She would rub her head against TigerWoods, cuddle up to him, slap him gentlly, push him playfully, jump over him light-footedly, in an effort to get TigerWoods mate with her. But when TigerWoods tried to bite the neck of Cathay in mating position, she would dash off. TigerWoods also did not want to show he is easy to get. When he is snubbed, he would just go and lie down by himself when Cathay had already positioned herself right in front of him!

I don't know what happened at night. At 5.30am this morning when I went to see them again, they both went to sleep around 5.45 am, very early compared to the normal 7.30am when the sun starts to shine hard.

During the afternoon monitoring at about 5.43pm, I heard the distinctive roars coming out of the 9 hectare camp and rushed over to find Cathay rolling belly up. It might be the heat-the two were not mating as frequently as in August. I waited nearly another hour before another successful mating attempt occurred. There were a couple of attempts between the two successful ones where the couple tried, but struggling to co-operate. One can almost feel that Cathay got frustrated or annoyed and just sauntered off from under TigerWoods, while he was still busy positioning himself.

Its been three weeks since Cathay gave birth. The first time a tiger comes into oestrus again after giving birth is normally the most fertle. Fingers crossed we will have some more South China Tiger babies in a few months' time.