Member Article

Zoo falls at male/female hurdle

You’d hope that zookeepers would be able to tell the difference between male and female varieties of their animals, but this is apparently not the case. Handlers of a polar bear brought to mate with a female in a zoo in northern Japan, found their breeding plan was doomed when they noticed that he, in fact, was a she.

Tsuyoshi, a four-year-old, 200kg cream-colored polar bear, had been living in harmony with a female polar bear since June, reports Reuters. Masako Inoue, a zookeeper at the Kushiro Municipal Zoo, said: “We thought he was a male, so we never had any doubts as we took care of him.

“But one day we realized that the two bears urinate in the same way, and we thought, is that how males do it? And once we started to look at things that way, we weren’t quite so sure.”

After two DNA examinations of Tsuyoshi’s hair and a manual exam, the zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female. They are now talking to nearby zoos about improving their breeding plans. Let’s hope other zoos are better at identifying male bears.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .