A giant panda at Edinburgh Zoo has been artificially inseminated for the third year in a row, renewing hopes she will give birth to the UK's first baby panda.
Tian Tian (sweetie) and her male partner Yang Guang (sunshine) are on loan from China for a decade, for an annual fee of roughly £600,000. Experts in Scotland have been desperately attempting to breed from the pair since 2011.
Tian Tian has been pregnant several times, but has always miscarried, with the foetus getting "reabsorbed" – a common occurrence in giant pandas both in the wild and captivity.
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Edinburgh zoo said the procedure was carried out using sperm from Yang Guang and was done by a team of three vets and a visiting panda expert from China. The pair will also be allowed to mate naturally and zookeepers insist the two pandas are "extremely interested in one another".
"Tian Tian is doing very well and everything went according to plan," Iain Valentine from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland told the Daily Telegraph.
But animal rights activists have criticised the move. "Unlike a human mother who makes the choice to undergo artificial insemination, Tian Tian has no say in whether she has these procedures," Libby Anderson from the animal protection charity OneKind told the BBC.
The group also criticised the zoo for breeding captive pandas that will never return to the wild. "We think that now is the time to leave these animals in peace," said Anderson.
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