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Panda Fakes Pregnancy To Get Preferential Treatment At Taipei Zoo

By Lindsay McCane
Published on: 04:43 PST, Aug 1, 2015

A panda at the Taipei Zoo reportedly faked her pregnancy in order to get preferential treatment from the zookeepers.

According to a report by China Daily USA, Yuan Yuan, one of two pandas that were given to Taiwan as a gift by the Chinese mainland in December 2008, started showing the tell-tell signs of pregnancy in June. Not only was she losing her appetite, her uterus was also thickening and she experienced increased fecal progesterone concentration. These symptoms alone were enough to deem the panda pregnant.

However, a translated report by China’s Southern Metropolis Daily confirmed Yuan Yuan’s pregnancy to be a false alarm after researchers flew in to perform ultrasound scans. They quickly noticed there were no baby pandas awaiting arrival.

Now, Yuan Yuan, an 11-year-old panda, is being accused of faking her pregnancy to receive special treatment, such as air conditioning in Taiwan’s incredibly hot summers. Pregnant pandas are treated as queens, so to speak, and Yuan Yuan, who was previously artificially inseminated and gave birth to a healthy cub Yuan Zai in 2013, already knew how well the treatment could be. Not only do they get the comfort of a cool room all to themselves, the pregnant pandas also receive round-the-clock care and all the bamboo and fruit they can eat.

While some like to believe that the panda was sneaky enough to trick the zoo into believing she was pregnant, a previous report by the Inquisitr suggests she was experiencing a phenomenon known as a pseudopregnancy, which happens when a females body displays all of the biological signs of pregnancy, but the fetus is not there. Pandas may think they are faking, but in all actuality, they are actually experiencing the very real pregnancy symptoms. Researchers attribute this to their unique reproductive cycles.

“A wild panda typically lives about 20 years and is not fertile until she’s at least five years old. Panda cubs gestate for about 50 days, but pandas only mate once every two or three years while raising a cub in between.”

Last year, a 6-year-old panda known as Ai Hin, was also accused of faking her pregnancy at the The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Centre, in Chengdu, China, according to another report by the Inquisitr. She experienced pregnancy symptoms for two months before it was determined she wasn’t actually expecting.

[Photo via Shutterstock]

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