Sticking needles into a tiger might not seem like the wisest of moves, but that’s exactly what happened at a safari park in Israel.
Vets turned to acupuncture after conventional medicine failed to treat 14-year-old Pedang’s chronic ear infection.
Luckily the Sumatran tiger was anaesthetised before the procedure took place.
A worker at the Ramat Gan Safari open air zoo, near Tel Aviv, said: ‘What we did today is acupuncture in points that will also help him eventually to deal with his own medical issue.’
She added that although the traditional Chinese medicine technique was regularly used on domesticated animals it was normally ‘much harder’ to use on wild animals.