Richard, a zookeeper, had been looking in vain for a mate for the tigress Carly to have offspring with – there were no other tigers at the zoo. Eventually, he consulted a specialist familiar with big cats, and a few weeks later, she was artificially inseminated.

An ultrasound confirmed the pregnancy, and Richard was excited about the prospect of having babies. However, as the pregnancy progressed, Carly became more withdrawn, restless, and distant. A week before the expected birth, everything changed – she began to experience severe pain, breathing heavily, sighing frequently, and rushing around the enclosure. But labor did not start, and the tigress’s condition worsened.

The vet asked Richard to describe the symptoms in detail: “She was restless, but now she was almost motionless and suffering,” he explained. “No signs of labor.” Then he asked to lay the tigress on her back – the only way to figure out what was going on.

Carly resisted at first, but then she resigned herself, and Richard gently straightened her legs, as the vet had advised. After that, the doctor felt a lump in her belly and insisted on an urgent ultrasound. This required light sedation – the vet shot a sedative from a dart.

During the scan, the tumor turned out to be not a cub but a foreign object: inside the abdominal cavity, there was something hard, resembling a microchip. At the same time, the ultrasound showed that the tigress and her unborn baby were relatively healthy; it was just that the mother was exhausted from overexertion.

At that moment, the police arrived – they found information in the special document that the very “assistant” in the case was a suspect. As it turned out, he illegally implanted Carly with an experimental device – and now this fact required the intervention of the authorities.

The doctors and police carefully removed the microchip. And soon, two tiger cubs were born – incredibly rare genes, born with a chance of one in a million. Richard named them Maxi and Lely and decided to keep them both: after all the worries, he could not part with either them or his mother.

The law caught up with the first suspect, and he was arrested. Peace and joy reigned in the zoo – Carly and her babies finally got a long-awaited rest surrounded by a caring keeper.