Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Zhang told me his breeding techniques had been developed after twenty years of trial and error. No experiment, it seemed, was too bizarre. Concerned that the captive-bred pandas might lack basic instincts, the keepers provided sex education in the form of wildlife videos showing the animals mating in the forests. When this panda porn failed to boost the beasts’ sex drives, the scientists tried the remedy used by millions of humans: Viagra. “We’ll never do that again,” Zhang said with a wry smile. “The panda was excited for twenty-four hours. We had to beat his erect penis with a stick.”

I laughed in sympathetic horror. Funnier and more pitiful still was the matchmaking deception used to minimize the risk of inbreeding. Male pandas were a discerning bunch. Left to their own devices, they would all mate with the sexiest females, which would shrink an already small genetic stock. To avoid this, researchers had to find a partner for even the least alluring females. How did they do that? “We tricked them,” Zhang said with another mischievous grin. The ruse was to put a fertile and attractive female into a breeding pen, where she left scratch marks and droppings before being taken away. A male panda was then introduced. Sniffing around, he grew excited to the point of sexual incontinence. That was the point for the zookeepers to bring in the new, less attractive female scented with the urine of the animal she replaced. The “ugly panda” was introduced into the mating pen rear end first, so the male could not see the face of his partner until they finished copulating.

“Don’t they get upset?” I asked, incredulously.

“Oh yes,” Zhang replied. “When the males find out, they get very angry and start fighting the female. We have had to use firecrackers and a water hose to separate them.”

I laughed louder and cringed more deeply, but we had not yet reached the bottom of this well of indignity for China’s national symbol.

Artificial insemination is far more effective than a blind date as a means of taking advantage of the three-day fertility window of a female panda. 28How, I wondered aloud, did the zookeepers harvest the semen? Since being shown, giant pandas have never seemed quite so cute and innocent.

Zhang took me to a lab, where researchers displayed a selection of large metal probes. These instruments were inserted into the anus of a sedated male, connected to an electricity supply, and then charged ever more powerfully until the panda ejaculated. 29Animal husbandry was not a subject for the fainthearted.

Such practices are the consequence of viewing animals primarily as an economic resource. Pandas make money. They are rented out to overseas zoos or nature parks for up to a million dollars a year. 30This generates suspicions that the breeding center was yet another rare-animal farm. 31That may be a little unfair on Zhang, who seemed genuinely concerned for his subjects. But, at the very least, it is a diversion from the more important task of conserving the wild population in their natural habitat.

Such concerns prompted the World Wide Fund for Nature, which uses the giant panda as its logo, to quietly drop support for Wolong in the early 1990s. Within China too there was a debate about its usefulness. Many zoologists, including Pan Wenshi, a leading exponent of eco-civilization theory, and Professor Wang Song, the founder of the China Species Red List, have distanced themselves from the work done at Wolong and similar facilities.

Many zoologists criticize the central assumption used to justify the breeding program, namely that giant pandas are naturally inadequate mates because they have short penises, narrow vaginas, and a low sex drive. 32Many studies suggest panda inadequacy is a myth, that the animals breed without difficulty in the wild, 33and that the reproductive problems, which appear to occur mainly in zoos, are not surprising in an unnatural habitat under constant surveillance.

I asked Zhang whether he was commercially motivated. No, he insisted, the ultimate goal was to build up the captive population so it could one day replenish the low numbers in the wild. He proved far more sincere than the tiger farmers of Xiongsen, but no more successful. Zhang’s team later released a captive-bred panda into the wild for the first time. Xiang Xiang was killed by rivals in less than a year. 34But Zhang insists the release program will continue. As with breeding, he hopes trial-and-error experiments will eventually result in success.

But there is a danger that the reliance on money and science will distract efforts from the core conservation problems of development and consumption. The giant pandas at Wolong have had more money and attention lavished on them than the majority of the world’s population. Cubs born there have a better chance of surviving than human babies in more than a dozen countries. 35But outside captivity, where the animals could not generate rents of a million dollars a year, the situation is very different.

The wild panda population remains precariously small, despite efforts to protect its natural habitat. One of the most encouraging conservation developments of recent years was a government’s pledge in 2005 to expand and connect the scattered nature reserves in the Min mountain range, which is home to Wolong and almost half of the world’s 1,590 wild pandas. 36More than the captive-breeding program, this could have improved the panda’s long-term chances of survival. But the well-intentioned creation of reserves was compromised by economic development. Roads, bridges, and dams were still being built in the protected areas, cutting the panda communities off from each other.

The survival of the panda is crucial for other creatures that share the same ecosystem. Like the tiger, it is an “umbrella species.” By protecting the habitats of such wide-ranging beasts, many smaller—and less attractive—creatures can be protected too. This is vital for species that taste better and look worse. Darwin never mentioned survival of the cutest, but it is a reality on a planet dominated by mankind. The public is willing to donate time and money to conserve big-eyed creatures but rarely considers amphibians, insects, or plant life. 37Many snakes and turtles are being eaten into extinction. 38The saddest example is that of the giant Yangtze softshell turtle. The last two in the world are at Suzhou Zoo. They are aged 80 and 100, but zookeepers have tried to mate them without success. Once they go, the earth will have lost another magnificent creature.

Conservation is failing in China. That is the view I have heard again and again in discussions with biodiversity experts, former officials, and environmental journalists. Captive breeding can prevent some threatened species used in traditional medicine from dying out completely, but overall wildlife is being decimated. The despondent view of John MacKinnon, one of the first foreign experts to work in China, is typical. “I’ve been doing biodiversity conservation for forty years,” he told me. “It is a bit depressing. We are doing more things, in more sophisticated ways, and yet destruction has outpaced us. I have written so many technical reports, but I have preached to an audience that doesn’t believe me.”

Xie Yan, the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society of China, told me the problem was a lack of love for nature and animals, except in regard to how they could be consumed: “When I go out with people to watch wildlife, they often say, ‘That looks very good to eat.’ It is hard to change thousands of years of culture. Because Chinese people eat everything, they can kill anything.” 39

Despite this grim prognosis, neither of them have given up. There are reasons for hope. The government is doing more than in the past. Species such as the Tibetan chiru and the gray snub-nosed monkey have been brought back from the brink. Public awareness is growing, particularly among the young urban middle class. Bird-watching is becoming popular, and no longer just for economic or culinary reasons. Small groups of young activists are trying to change consumer attitudes and put pressure on restaurants and markets. 40In academia, Zhao Qikun of the Kunming Institute of Zoology is among those calling for a more spiritual approach to nature. Peking University has set up the nation’s first Ecological Civilization Research Center, headed by Professor Pan, reportedly an opponent of captive breeding. President Hu Jintao has made the creation of an “eco-civilization” a goal of his “Scientific Development” program.