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As often happens, an item about a tiger's nursing piglets appears to be a case in which someone came across some unusual photographs with no explanatory context and decided to make up his own background story. The pictures are real, but the accompanying explanation about a mother tiger in California being given piglets to ease her through a depression stemming from the loss of her own cubs is nothing but fiction: These pictures were actually taken in 2004 not in California, but at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand. Although the Sriracha Tiger Zoo hosted one of the world's most successful tiger breeding programs, unlike most western zoos it also offered circus- and carnival-like shows, exhibits, and interactions, including (as evidenced here) the mixture of adults and young of quite different species in the same enclosures, as described by the AWI Quarterly, a publication of the Animal Welfare Institute: The mixture of tiger and piglets depicted in these images therefore was not something undertaken for functional reasons, but rather as a common form of visual entertainment provided by the zoo for the amusement of its visitors. According to the Pattaya Mail, these tiger-pig nursing relationships have also been reciprocated to the extent that the mother tiger shown suckling piglets was herself nursed by a sow: Although these pictures might appear charming and innocent, the AWI noted back in 2004 that there may be a darker side to the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, as press reports stated that Sriracha was under investigation for illegally breeding protected wildlife for commercial export and had been implicated in the sale of a hundred tigers to China (where there is strong demand for tiger body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicines). The AWI also noted that in late 2004 the zoo was closed for a month when between 80 and 100 tigers died or were euthanized due to an avian influenza (probably spread via the raw chicken carcasses fed to the tigers) that swept through the facility.
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