EnglishLady
Veteran Expediter
Sky News
Conservationists in China are resorting to extreme measures in their ongoing effort to increase the number of giant pandas in the wild.
They are dressing up in costumes of the endangered animals to make sure cubs bred in capitivity do not get used to human contact before they are released.
The ruse was used to take a four-month-old cub to the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Centre in Sichuan Province, south-west China.
The cub is living in a fenced off part of the forest where it is monitored by CCTV 24 hours a day.
It will eventually be released into the wild to fend for itself
Pandas are notoriously bad at mating naturally but Chinese scientists have had great success this year with a total of 19 births in captivity.
They have now reached their target of the 300 births they needed to start reintroducing them to the wild.
Techniques such as artificial insemination, sperm freezing and twin swapping have increased the captive-breeding success rate.
There are currently fewer than 2,500 of the animals left in the wild as their natural habitat becomes increasingly marginalised.
Previous attempts at reintroducing captive-bred pandas to the wild ended in disaster in 2006 when male cub Xiang Xiang was found dead 10 months later, apparently killed by other wild pandas
Conservationists in China are resorting to extreme measures in their ongoing effort to increase the number of giant pandas in the wild.
They are dressing up in costumes of the endangered animals to make sure cubs bred in capitivity do not get used to human contact before they are released.
The ruse was used to take a four-month-old cub to the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Centre in Sichuan Province, south-west China.
The cub is living in a fenced off part of the forest where it is monitored by CCTV 24 hours a day.
It will eventually be released into the wild to fend for itself
Pandas are notoriously bad at mating naturally but Chinese scientists have had great success this year with a total of 19 births in captivity.
They have now reached their target of the 300 births they needed to start reintroducing them to the wild.
Techniques such as artificial insemination, sperm freezing and twin swapping have increased the captive-breeding success rate.
There are currently fewer than 2,500 of the animals left in the wild as their natural habitat becomes increasingly marginalised.
Previous attempts at reintroducing captive-bred pandas to the wild ended in disaster in 2006 when male cub Xiang Xiang was found dead 10 months later, apparently killed by other wild pandas
