cavinti diaspora

My friend Carolyn sent me a cute and endearing email today. Entitled ‘Pork Chops’, it told the story of a mother tiger who lives in a California zoo giving birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. But, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size they died shortly after birth.

The email continued the story, saying:

“The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery suddenly started to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother’s cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment.

Sometimes a mother of one species will take on the care of a different species. The only ‘orphans’ that could be found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zookeepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops?

Take a look… Now, please tell me one more time? Why can’t the rest of the world get along??

Cute, endearing and has the message for world peace, which by the way actually describes my friend Carolyn since I have known her. As adults, keeping in touch with her made me realize how much I have missed her upbeat personality and her joie de vivre.

I “met her again” via tipakan.com. Yes, I helped my mother Lucila Oblena to start this site. I just did not know that it would also help me find my friends again.

But, right now, let’s go back to the urban legend of the tiger and piglets. This email had been going around since 2006. (Yes, it has been that long.)

The photos are real, but the story is fiction, written perhaps by an optimist who truly wants world peace and for all of us to get along. The message and the photos are so memorable and touching, it became an urban legend.

According to Snopes.com, a website that studies urban legends; the photos were actually taken from a zoo in Thailand and not in California. If you want to know more about it, please log on here:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/tigerpig.asp

As closing, I would like to say that though the story might be fiction, the message is real – world peace.

Thanks Carolyn for passing this along.