TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — With politics put aside, well-wishers gathered to want the Taipei zoo’s senior panda a contented twentieth birthday.
Guests crowded round Yuanyuan’s enclosure to take images of her with a birthday cake within the form of the quantity 20.
Yuanyuan was born in China and arrived in 2008 along with her accomplice Tuantuan. He died in 2022 at age 18 however not earlier than fathering two feminine cubs, Yuanzai and Yuanbao, now 11 and 4 respectively and nonetheless dwelling on the zoo.
Danielle Shu, a 20-year-old Brazilian pupil in Taiwan, mentioned she discovered on-line clips of the pandas an pleasing distraction. “And I simply discover it actually humorous and cute,” Shu mentioned.
Big pandas are native solely to China, and Beijing bestows them as an indication of political amity. Yuanyuan and Tuantuan arrived in Taiwan throughout a interval of relative calm between the perimeters, which break up amid civil conflict in 1949. China claims the island its personal territory, to be annexed by army drive if essential.
Confronted with declining habitat and a notoriously low birthrate, big panda populations have declined to round 1,900 within the mountains of western China, whereas 600 pandas stay in zoos and breeding facilities in China and all over the world.
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