Jill Harness
So a Lion, a Tiger and a Bear Walk Into a Bar…
by Jill Harness - March 3, 2010 - 8:53 AM

What do you do when a raid of a drug dealer’s house turns up a lion, a tiger and a bear cub that are each only two months old? If you work for Noah’s Ark Animal Rescue, you may end up taking all three in together and letting them form a beautifully bizarre friendship.

“We could have separated them, but since they came as a kind of family, the zoo decided to keep them together,” said Diane Smith, assistant director of the Noah’s Ark zoo. “To our knowledge, this is the only place where you’ll find this combination of animals together, they are our BLT, (bear, lion and tiger).

The 1000 pound bear, Baloo, and the two 350 pound cats, Shere Khan and Leo, play together like brothers. The keepers say that Baloo and Shere Khan are the closest –in what seems like a very strange twist on the classic Jungle Book story.

“It is wonderful and magical to see a giant American Black Bear put his arm around a Bengal tiger and then to see the tiger nuzzle up to the bear like a domestic cat.”

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Comments (10)

  1. Oh my.

    posted by jiminut on 3-3-2010 at 9:36 am

  2. … or as the cowboys would say, Oh my gravy!

    posted by Hyacinth on 3-3-2010 at 11:26 am

  3. this will end badly

    posted by Harry Seaward on 3-3-2010 at 11:29 am

  4. “apparently no one told them they were different species and that they weren’t supposed to get along.” they’ve been together for 9 years…can you believe that? wow

    posted by gaby on 3-3-2010 at 11:34 am

  5. Cool.

    posted by Sara in AL on 3-3-2010 at 11:49 am

  6. All brought to you courtesy of the merry old drug dealer of Oz.

    posted by Bert on 3-3-2010 at 12:52 pm

  7. They get along because they’re overfed. The two cats are morbidly obese.

    posted by Antinous on 3-3-2010 at 8:57 pm

  8. And maybe no one ever told them they had to be adversaries just because they were different from one another.
    There is a song in “South Pacific”,part of a line from which goes…”you have to be carefully taught”….to hate and discriminate…These animals didn’t get that memo….Oh, that we could all not get it…and make our decisions about others based on the individual, not some name, color or stripe

    posted by M. Forrest on 3-3-2010 at 11:28 pm

  9. I originally clicked on this thinking it would be a golf joke including Tiger, John Daly and Jack Nicholas. Oh well.

    posted by Sir Struggle on 3-4-2010 at 12:47 am

  10. Wow, such original names… That is adorable though.

    posted by Twisstata on 4-22-2010 at 2:01 pm

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