Officials respond to sudden death of giant panda The recent death of a two-year-old giant panda has caused quite a buzz in China. The #panda, #XinYuan, was scheduled to be released into the wild this month, but died from respiratory and renal failure on November 20. The staff at the #GiantPanda Conservation and Research Center failed to find Xin Yuan on November 18 and searched for nearly two days before discovering her body. The news of her death, however, was made public on Saturday, two weeks after the actual incident. Huang Yan, a Deputy Chief Engineer from the center, responded to questions about the delay on Sunday. He said that the reason for the delay was that they needed time to confirm the death cause of the panda before they announced it to the public. Xin Yuan was raised in an enclosure together with her mother Long Xin for a rehabilitation project. She was trained in searching for food and water, while avoiding predators. All of this was in order to ensure that she could be released into the wild. So how come there was no prior sense of the creature suffering from any problems? Explaining how that could be the case, Huang said that “Xin Yuan was in a training process to get accustomed to the wild. It’s different from in captivity when we can keep an eye on the panda for 24 hours.” “Although we have intensive monitoring even for those pandas that are being trained to get used to the wild, the GPS device (we installed on her body) could not send back details in real time. We could only know her position, but not her exact condition at that moment. Her death was sudden for us too, Huang added. Giant pandas are one of the worlds most endangered species and are found only in China. Around 1,600 of the animals live in the wild, mostly in the mountains of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, while more than 300 live in captivity. #China began sending captive-bred pandas into the wild since 2006. Four of them have been released so far, with the last one Xue Xue set free in October. (With inputs from Xinhua)
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 15:21:01 +0000
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