VLADIVOSTOK, May 28. /TASS/. Four Amur tigers have been brought from Russia to Kazakhstan in a unique experiment performed as part of an international relocation program aimed at restoring the Caspian tiger population, Sergey Aramilev, director of the Amur Tiger center, told TASS.

Two male and two female Amur tigers were selected for the relocation program. One pair of tigers, a male and a female, are adults aged three to four years, while the second pair are tiger cubs, aged six to seven months. Before being released into the wild, they will spend some time at a rehabilitation center in Kazakhstan’s Ile-Balkhash Nature Reserve in order to adapt to the new conditions.

Amur tigers are the closest relatives of Caspian tigers, which used to inhabit Central Asia. In Kazakhstan, they went extinct by 1948. The country expects that the special program will help revive their population.

"The relocation of the four tigers is a scientific experiment because no one in the world has ever released large predators into areas where a close subspecies went extinct earlier," Aramilev pointed out.

According to him, researchers will be able to gauge the tigers’ personalities based how they react to their new habitat and the way they explore it.