Animal Facts

Like all of their kind, the Javan tiger was a beautiful creature, with similar coloring to the Sumatran tiger, orange fur fading to light underneath and black stripes. But the Javan tiger was distinctive both for their stripes, which were darker and more numerous, even double-looping on their sides and back, and their whiskers, which were the longest of any tiger. A large feline, the males were typically around eight feet long and weighed between two and three hundred pounds; the females were a little smaller.

The Javan tigers were solitary animals, only mingling to mate. The female would give birth to two or three cubs after an average of 103 days of pregnancy. The cubs were born blind and helpless, weighing only two to three pounds. They would stay with their mother for almost two years, learning to hunt and survive.

They existed all over the Indonesian island of Java, at one time so numerous they were considered an annoyance. But as humans moved into the area, the tigers lost a lot of their territory to agriculture and those that didn't move into remote areas where hunted relentlessly. The Javan natives considered the tigers to be their dead relatives reborn, yet surprisingly they hunted these tigers the most frequently. The tiger population continued to decline sharply from the 1950s through the 70s, the last tracks of these animals were found in 1979. It is generally believed that these magnificent tigers disappeared from our world not long after.