When Yulia Borg, 8, was shown a photograph of newborn tiger Sheena in a basket with two other soft toys, she mistook the cub for one of the stuffed animals.

“I didn’t believe it and I still don’t believe it that we have a baby tiger because it’s been very long since we’ve had baby tigers,” she said excitedly, as she gently stroked the cub under the watchful eyes of her parents.

The cub was born on Monday, weighing in at 1.17 kilograms, to two of the three Bengal tigers that live at the Wildlife Park Malta in Mtaħleb.

The tigers coexist with lions, lemurs, otters, wallabies and flamingos in the small-scale zoo.

In April the park was given a zoo licence on the remit that it operated an educational and research programme and only after the veterinary and agriculture departments ensured the animals’ pens adhered to international zoo standards.

“It’s hard to believe that within two years, she’ll weigh over 368 kilograms,” park owner Chris Borg said, bottle-feeding the cub.

Unfortunately, when the cub was born, its mother, Zuzulka, licked it clean but refused to suckle it or have anything otherwise to do with it.

The father, Hero, was showing more interest in his offspring than the mother.

Mr Borg explained that he was wary of approaching the cub as tigers were generally very protective of their offspring. However, when he realised that the tigress was not caring for her cub, he cautiously approached the newborn and took it, without any reaction from Zuzulka.

Sheena is bottle-fed cat’s milk every three hours, including during the night. It has 10 days to go before it can open its eyes and is expected to walk properly within three weeks.

But is not the wild the ideal place for tigers to live?

“Yes, the ideal place for a tiger is to be in the wild but you cannot have a tiger which was born and bred in captivity returned to the wild because she will die. We fully agree tigers shouldn’t be caught in the wild and put in captivity but, in our case, all the animals we’ve got are bred from generations in captivity so they do not have any hunting instincts.”

“If Sheena was born in the wild, she would not have survived,” his partner, Oksana Sadova, added. “In our case, we stepped in, bottle-fed her and now she seems to be doing very well.”