HILO — Two new felines are on their way to the Panaewa Rainforest Zoo and Gardens.
HILO — Two new felines are on their way to the Panaewa Rainforest Zoo and Gardens.
The pair of Bengal tiger cubs is expected to arrive next week at the county-owned zoo. The cubs, a white male and an orange female, were born last July.
They were gifted to the zoo by Great Cats World Park in Cave Junction, Oregon, said Ilihia Gionson, executive assistant to Mayor Billy Kenoi.
Gionson said in an e-mail that the cubs would be viewable on Friday, March 4. They will live in a enclosure adjacent to their sleeping quarters for their first 120 days at the zoo, per state quarantine requirements.
Panaewa’s tiger enclosure, described by zoo director Pam Mizuno as the facility’s focal point, has been vacant for more than two years. Namaste, the 15-year-old white Bengal tiger who was the zoo’s star attraction for more than a decade, was euthanized in January 2014.
The new cubs are approximately the same age as Namaste was when he first arrived, she said.
According to testimony presented during the lengthy permit process needed to bring the cubs into Hawaii, the zoo has had five tigers since it first opened in 1978. The cubs’ permit was unanimously approved during a Jan. 26 meeting of the state Board of Agriculture, following unanimous approval from the state Department of Agriculture’s Advisory Committee on Plants and Animals last November.
The effort to bring tigers to Panaewa has been criticized by the state chapter of the Humane Society of the United States throughout the process, largely because the zoo is not accredited by the American Zoological Association. Hawaii’s only other zoo, the Honolulu Zoo, is AZA-accredited.
Humane Society of the United States also has raised concern about Great Cats World Park and its owner, Craig Warner, whom Gibson described as having a “tumultuous history” of violating the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Welfare Act. In 1993, Warner was found guilty of beating a tiger with a two-by-four, and received a suspended jail sentence.
In addition to the tigers, two American alligators are also set to take up residence at the zoo in early April. The new pair is from Colorado Gators Reptile Park, located in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.
It’s been decades since the zoo had alligators on display, although the crocodilian species was one of the first to be exhibited at Panaewa.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.