What better way to finish off the week than with the first wobbly steps of a two-month-old polar bear?
The Toronto Zoo released this video earlier this week to mark how far the young male has come since wildlife officials first made the difficult decision to remove him from his zoo mother and place him under human care.
His two siblings had died with 48 hours of their birth on Nov. 9 and he appeared to be losing strength when officials made the call.
The team has housed him in a temperature controlled environment, fed him seven times a day and administered a mild exercise regiment. The earliest signs that the attention had paid off was when he began crawling on November 17 and rolling over for the first time on November 23. And now look how far he's come!
As the video shows, he can stand on all fours and take some steps. He's down to six bottles of milk a day and is starting to learn how to lap it up from a dish rather than suck. And he weighs in at a healthy 4.4 kg (9.7 pounds) -- a 529 percent increase since his original birth weight of 700 grams (1.5 pounds).
"We are very happy with his progress so far. We hope that he will grow up to become another ambassador for his species, highlighting threats to the arctic environment," Dr. Graham Crawshaw, Senior Veterinarian, said in a press release.
Source
The Toronto Zoo released this video earlier this week to mark how far the young male has come since wildlife officials first made the difficult decision to remove him from his zoo mother and place him under human care.
His two siblings had died with 48 hours of their birth on Nov. 9 and he appeared to be losing strength when officials made the call.
The team has housed him in a temperature controlled environment, fed him seven times a day and administered a mild exercise regiment. The earliest signs that the attention had paid off was when he began crawling on November 17 and rolling over for the first time on November 23. And now look how far he's come!
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As the video shows, he can stand on all fours and take some steps. He's down to six bottles of milk a day and is starting to learn how to lap it up from a dish rather than suck. And he weighs in at a healthy 4.4 kg (9.7 pounds) -- a 529 percent increase since his original birth weight of 700 grams (1.5 pounds).
"We are very happy with his progress so far. We hope that he will grow up to become another ambassador for his species, highlighting threats to the arctic environment," Dr. Graham Crawshaw, Senior Veterinarian, said in a press release.
Source
VIDEO
...one thankful step for mankind...
ADORABLE
awesome ...
This little one is so cute and sweet. Just wish I could pick up and cuddle with. Simply ADORABLE.