A POLAR bear breeding programme at a zoo in northern Japan was doomed from the start as keepers discovered that their male was in fact female.
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.”
She added: “But one day we realised 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 Kushiro Municipal Zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female.
