Will zoo’s pandas finally have a cub?
IT may end up a triumph of hope over experience, with vets at Edinburgh Zoo once again trying to help the UK’s only female giant panda to get pregnant.
Tian Tian was artificially inseminated by vets at Edinburgh Zoo in March in the hope she will finally conceive and have a cub this summer.
It is the fifth time the procedure has been carried out after experts decided there was no prospect her mating naturally with their resident male Yang Guang.
But the move has been criticised by animal rights campaigners as financially motivated and of ‘perpetuating the cruel cycle of captive breeding’.
Iain Valentine, giant panda director at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, wrote in a blog last month: ‘Both pandas are doing well, with Tian Tian splitting her time between her new nesting box and the wider enclosure over the past few weeks... it is important biologically for Tian Tian, a female in her prime, to breed and reproduce and add to a vital ex situ population outside of China.’ The pandas were moved to Scotland in December 2011. Any cubs will return to China at age two.
Yesterday, animal charity Onekind said: ‘Tian Tian should be left in peace.’
Elisa Allen, of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said: ‘While the birth of a panda cub may bolster the zoo’s coffers, it does nothing to protect pandas in nature.
‘If Edinburgh Zoo genuinely cared about this much-loved species, its funds would be directed towards habitat conservation rather than perpetuating the cruel cycle of captive breeding.’