Tigers are solitary, wide-ranging big cats whose welfare in captivity requires large naturalistic spaces, scent enrichment, and careful social management.
Tiger welfare in captivity requires confronting the fundamental mismatch between a species evolved for vast territories and the necessarily limited space of zoo enclosures. Modern zoo tiger exhibits have improved substantially — larger, more complex, with enrichment programmes that engage hunting and marking behaviours. But the gap between what wild tigers experience and what captive tigers can remains large. The conservation justification for captive tiger populations is real but requires welfare investment: unhealthy, behaviourally abnormal tigers do not contribute meaningfully to conservation programmes. Tiger cub petting operations — a major welfare concern in Asia and the US — use animals that are separated from mothers early and discarded when they outgrow the petting age.