( dpa )- A 24-year-old German medical student described Friday how she used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive a tiger cub that nearly choked to death on a chunk of meat.
Janine Bauer, who was visiting the Berg Zoo in December with her one-year-old son Johann, asked a keeper to let her into the pen and to hold the prone feline down while she cleared its airway, gave heart massage and revived it with the kiss of life.
The zoo in Halle , eastern Germany did not make the incident public at the time.
Bauer told MDR television in Halle that the young Malayan tiger appeared to have been too greedy to chew its food properly: "I saw him shiver, fall over, twitch a bit and become immobile.
"It took three to five minutes, but he revived in the end." In gratitude, the zoo has named the tiger Johann after her son.