The artificially blurred surroundings make it cartoon-like. And since we can still see that there are rocks and another tiger, we can even guess that the original image probably looked nice without blurring. If you want a natural softening of the background, use an aperture like f/2.0 or however small your camera goes; that will put things away from the tiger out of focus in a way that looks much more realistic.
This image would probably look good without any blurring; try uploading it so we can see!
Nice shot of a Siberian tiger cub, but I don't understand the bad way you did try to soften the surroundings Mike, it does pull the whole image down because it's not done very well....Best regards, Harry
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