TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan has welcomed a pair of consultants from China to assist with an ailing panda in a uncommon alternative for contact between the edges.
The 2 consultants arrived Tuesday after Taipei Zoo’s Tuan Tuan, suspected to have a malignant mind tumor, took a flip for the more severe. The enormous panda and his mate, Yuan Yuan, have been gifted to the zoo in 2008 throughout a time of warming relations between China and Taiwan, which break up amid civil struggle in 1949.
Ties have deteriorated since then, with Beijing slicing off contacts in 2016 following the election of independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen, who was re-elected in 2020. Polls routinely present Taiwanese rejecting China’s demand for political unification between the edges, favoring as a substitute the established order of de-facto independence.
China sends pandas overseas as an indication of goodwill however maintains possession over the animals and any cubs they produce. The animals are native to southwestern China and are an unofficial nationwide mascot.
An MRI on Tuan Tuan confirmed that lesions on his mind had grown in an indication the illness was “progressing quickly,” the zoo mentioned in a information launch.
Zoo spokesperson Eric Tsao mentioned the edges have been pooling their data and expertise to offer Tuan Tuan with “the very best therapy and the very best day by day care.”
Chief veterinarian Lai Yen-hsueh mentioned the consultants had agreed to carry off on surgical procedure based mostly on the animal’s attainable response to anesthesia and the situation of the diseased space.
The consultants, Wu Honglin and Wei Ming, have lengthy expertise engaged on panda well being and copy on the major panda analysis base at Wolong in China’s Sichuan province.
Pandas, which reproduce not often within the wild and depend on a weight-reduction plan of bamboo, stay among the many world’s most threatened species. An estimated 1,800 pandas reside within the wild, whereas one other 500 are in zoos or reserves, principally in Sichuan.
