THE CLOUDED TIGER 59 



to her keeper, and even coming up to the bars to be 

 fed, she is nervously distrustful of strangers, and the 

 presence of a crowd of excited children before the 

 cage promptly elicits a deep bass growl or an angry 

 warning snarl. Active in the earlier part of the 

 day, when the sun grows hot she becomes lethargic, 

 either sleeping curled up on her straw — a living 

 mosaic of colour — or else reposing flat on her shelf, 

 sometimes with the long' tail hanoing- down like a 

 creeper dangling in a forest,^ When climbing the 

 clouded tiger is a most graceful beast. Sir Stamford 

 Raffles's specimen would jump to the top of the cage 

 and cling lithe and muscular to the roof, or would 

 twist round and round in playful sport, the handsome 

 tail whirling after it like the expanded brush of a 

 squirrel. When on the ground, owing to its short 

 legs, the clouded tiger walks with a sailor-like 

 slouch. A mate for the Regent's Park animal, — 

 being a wild and newly-imported specimen purchased 

 from Cross, of Liverpool, for ^30 — was received at the 

 Gardens in September, 1904. Naturalists had thus 

 (probably for the first time in the annals of Zoology) 

 a brief opportunity of comparing in the same collec- 

 tion and under the same conditions of housing, 



1 Perhaps this latter liabit renders the wild tree-tiyer more incon- 

 spicuous when asleep, the Malay forests beiny over-run with various 

 parasitic creepers. The Rev. J. G. Wood states that he saw the specimen 

 of 1854 lying on a branch in its ca<,'e, with its cheek pillowed on a branch 

 and all four feet hanginj; in the air. As already mentioned, the tail of 

 the clouded tifi:er, thouj,'h of ample proportions, suddenly narrows to a 

 conical point in the terminal sixth: it tlius actually su}j;<^ests the tip of 

 a growing creeper ! By the way, the native name of the black panther 

 is lii'inau (or Ariinau) rt/i:ar = tiger of the lianas. 



