Can a tiger and a lion mate?

The answer is, yes. In captivity people do put tigers and lions together in the same cage and hope that they will mate to produce a hybrid. The hybrid is called a liger. There are other versions of this hybrid. For example a white tiger crossed with a lion and so on.

The liger has hybrid vigor. It is a very large animal. The world's biggest individual cat is a liger called "Hercules". Doc Antle, a showman, cares for him. I don't know if he bred him. He lives in America.

Tiger and lion mated to produce Hercules a liger.

The liger is larger than either the tiger or lion. But the ligers that I have seen are flabby and look odd. And I don't mean that the coat pattern is odd although it is strange.

I mean that the body conformation is odd. I would not be surprised if there are some problems in breeding ligers that we don't hear about. As you can see Hercules is massive and it does not look right to me.

The liger is bred as a spectacle in a zoo. They are created for business purposes. There is no other reason for its creation and I don't like it one bit. It feels wrong to me; an abuse of two beautiful cats that would normally never meet up in the wild as the lion is found on the African continent and the tiger lives in Asia.