Read my lips, it’s not a sausage ...
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A GIANT panda gave birth to a healthy male cub in a Belgian zoo yesterday, a rare event for an endangered species that numbers fewer than 2,000 living in the wild.
The cub was born in the early hours at the Paira Daiza wildlife park to 6-year-old Hao Hao and her mate Xing Hui.
The pink, blind, hairless cub weighed just 171 grams. Hao Hao’s “probable” pregnancy was announced just two weeks ago, accompanied by caution about detecting the tiny fetus.
The cub, to be named later, emerged as “a little pink sausage” and gave a loud cry before being scooped up in Hao Hao’s mouth, the park’s zoological director Tim Bouts said.
Mother and baby were now doing well, he said, “but we are still in a risky period.”
The zoo, which has hosted the pair since 2014, cooperated with experts from China to impregnate the mother by artificial insemination.
World nature organization WWF says a survey in 2014 found only 1,864 giant pandas living in the wild, almost double the number in the late 1970s and 17 percent up in a decade.
As part of efforts to save the species, which has been hit hard by human encroachment on the highlands where they survive on a diet of bamboo, more than 300 pandas now live in zoos, mostly in China.
They notoriously struggle to reproduce in captivity, however — though artificial breeding techniques and better knowledge of the animals’ needs have led to an increase in births in recent years.
Pairi Daiza said Belgium had become the third country in Europe to see the successful reproduction of pandas after Austria and Spain.
The last successful birth in Europe was in Madrid three years ago.
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