This video was shot during my time volunteering at an animal sanctuary & cheetah conservation project in South Africa 🇿🇦
Interested in how I got to volunteer with incredible wildlife in South Africa? Just hit me up on Instagram (@matthias.pav) or Facebook (Matthias Páv), and I'll do my best to answer your questions about wildlife volunteering and share tips on visiting this project.
Knowing I've inspired action truly makes my day!
Nevada, the snow white bengal tiger has an enormous enclosure and his care takers are very passionate and dedicated towards his wellbeing and happiness. As you can see, he can come in and out of the smaller cage, where he gets fed, as he pleases.
Stick feeding serves 2 main purposes;
1) When animals are taken out of their natural environment (in this case the South African police (NSPCA) handed Nevada over, as a cub, to the sanctuary to avoid him getting sold on the black market) it is very important to keep them happy and stimulated, like they would be in nature.
Stick feeding provides this kind of cognitive stimulation, also commonly known as "Enrichment".
2) Some facilities prefer to train their animals in such a way, that in the case the veterinarian needs to apply medication or needs to do a general health check up, the animals are already accustomed to coming close to the fence and interact with humans.
This way, unnecessary sedation by the vet can be avoided.
Over the last century, tiger numbers have dropped to only 7% percent of their original population size world wide.
..with only some 4000 left in the wild due to poaching for the harvesting of their bones and beautiful fur mainly for chinese "traditional medicin"
White tigers have a double recessive gene
So they are not albinos, but are the blond, blue-eyed version of the orange Bengal tiger
But nevada is a very rare individual as he is white & stripeless (there are approximately only 20 tigers with this trait).