2-year-old female Amur tiger passes away at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in freak accident

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (CMZoo) and the Toronto Zoo are dealing with the tragic loss of two-year-old Mila, a female Amur tiger, who passed away after slipping off a waist-high bench.

Mila came to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in March 2023 from the Toronto Zoo. She came to the zoo on a future breeding recommendation.

“She was making such great progress with us,” Rebecca Zwicker, animal care manager in Asian Highlands at CMZoo said in a press release. “She was a feisty and intelligent tiger, and the team had been patiently and consistently training with her to help her settle in and feel comfortable in indoor and outdoor spaces behind the scenes. She was getting so close to being out where guests could see her. We were excited to introduce her to our community and for people to fall in love with her here, just as they had in Toronto.”

However, before being officially introduced to the CMZoo community, caretakers discovered a severe dental issue that needed to be addressed. Officials said if left untreated, the dental issue could've been fatal. Keepers began re-establishing voluntary injection training that the Toronto Zoo Wildlife Care staff had previously established once they realized she needed surgery.

On Friday, Aug. 25, Mila voluntarily received the injection of initial anesthesia. She then jumped up on a bench where she began to lay down and let the anesthetic drug take effect. The CMZoo said less than a minute after lying down, Mila slipped off the waist-high bench and suffered a fatal spinal injury.

“She could have slid off from that height a hundred times and landed in a variety of other positions and been unaffected,” Dr. Eric Klaphake, CMZoo's head veterinarian, said in a press release. “The team quickly entered her den when it was safe and diligently tried for 40 minutes to give her life-saving care.”

Officials said given the short timeframe from her lying down to her slipping off, it was impossible from a human safety standpoint to stop her tragic fall.

“These are impossible life-and-death decisions being made in real-time by a team that has dedicated their life to the care of animals. Do you anesthetize her despite the risks and give her the dental care she needs? Once you see her slipping, you wonder if you can safely get in there to stop a 270-pound tiger from falling completely. How fast can you safely go in and provide rescue attempts?,” said Bob Chastain, CMZoo president and CEO, in a press release. “You can plan and plan and things still go wrong. Our team delivered exactly the right amount of drugs to a very calm tiger who had trained for this moment. We have successfully anesthetized countless tigers in this same den, and have never experienced an accident like this. We never take decisions to anesthetize an animal for a procedure lightly, and this is a tragic example of why.”

Moving forward, the CMZoo said it's focused on preventing this freak accident from happening in the future. Mila is the second female Amur tiger to pass away at the CMZoo in the last five years. In 2021, officials said Savelii passed away due to complications during recovery from an artificial insemination procedure.

While their deaths are unrelated, officials said the fragile state of their species is glaring. Savelii's death prompted the CMZoo to make a long-term financial decision to support tigers in their natural habitat as well as in the zoo. Chastain said it's sobering to know that tigers in the wild are dying every day.

The CMZoo said Amur tigers are critically endangered in the wild with only around 500 individual tigers roaming their native habitats. The numbers in human care, at zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) in the U.S. and Canada, hover near just 100 individuals.

“Watching Mila transform from a playful and curious young cub to an independent and often feisty young adult was an incredible experience for me, the Zoo team, and the Toronto community,” said Dolf DeJong, CEO, of Toronto Zoo, in a press release. “She will be deeply missed by all, and while we feel certain the connections she made with guests will stay with them for a lifetime and were an inspiration to get involved in the fight to save this endangered species in the wild, we are deeply saddened by her loss.”