Name the Baby Panda

A few days ago I noticed this page in China Daily, requesting names for 18 baby pandas about to be moved out of their nursery. Over 30,000 entries were received prior to today's naming ceremony at a nature preserve in China's Sichuan Province. The BBC has a photo gallery of the event, and the eighteen five-to-seven-month-old panda cubs.

I've always had a sort of emotional reaction to pandas, maybe because I was very fond of a large stuffed toy panda that I had when I was little - it was about the same size I was, and I used to dance with it; I can remember exactly how its fuzzy "fur" felt. As a grown-up, visiting Washington D.C., I once begged my brother-in-law to take me to the Washington Zoo to see the giant pandas that have been part of the zoo's endangered-species breeding program since the first pair arrived in 1972, after Richard Nixon's visit to China. I have a love-hate relationship with zoos - I can't stand the idea of animals being taken out of their habitats, confined, and displayed -- and yet I am fascinated to see them; I'm appalled by extinction and glad that there are breeding programs designed to return animals to the wild, though I find it terribly sad that these programs, and captivity, are necessary for the preservation of species.

I had never seen a giant panda, and just wanted to. It was feeding time when we arrived, and we could only catch glimpses of the panda, working its way through a pile of green bamboo, but I would swear to you that it looked as much like a man in a panda-bear costume as a real animal - it was uncanny.

Addendum, Sunday morning: I'm really unsure how I feel about all of this. I've just been viewing the current Washington, D.C. pandas - mother Mei Xiang and her young cub, Tai Shan, on the "Animal Planet" webcam, in their enclosure at the "Fujifilm Panda Habitat" at the zoo. There are cute pictures of the cub, and information that ranges from the scientific and educational to the totally commercial. Pandas raise money for the zoo, and also for panda preservation. The popularity and commercialization of all the "guest" pandas since Ling-Ling go hand-in-hand (the giant pandas are on loan to America from China; they are here for study and as part of the effort to breed giant pandas for return to the wild), but I had no idea how out-of-hand the economic exploitation and apologetics seem to have gotten. Humans think pandas are cute: bears remind us of ourselves - it's a natural money-maker. I'm sure the pandas have done a great deal for the Washington Zoo - and, of course, in addition to the obvious "Save the Giant Panda!"message, the animals are also being used as symbols of cooperation and good will between our two governments in the absence of effective long-term environmental policies. What I need to read up on is how successful the breeding program has actually been, and what the chances are of these animals ever becoming unendangered, as China's natural habitat shrinks even further.

FACTS: (from a BBC article last summer stating that there may be as many as 3,000 wild pandas - twice as many as previously thought)

- Half of the panda's mountainous bamboo habitat was lost between 1974 and 1988

- Agriculture, logging and China's huge population rise have all played a role in the panda's downfall

- There are now 40 panda reserves in China compared to 13 two decades ago
- and this big fact: American zoos "rent" their pandas from China to the tune of $1,000,000/year per breeding pair. When the cub was born this past year in washington, the zoo paid China $600,000.

What is the right thing to do? I am all for conservation and efforts to preserve species, but if wild habitat preservation is not an intrinsic part of the effort, how can it possibly succeed? Will we end up with the Fujifilm Panda Park, a fenced enclosure somewhere with the last remaining "wild" pandas living in it, followed by 24-hour webcams, and surrounded by souvenir stands selling t-shirts? There is something incredibly sad and exploitative about all of this, beyond the  potential for extinction itself. Do any readers have more information? Opinions?

Comments

[tarakuanyin]

I have the same mixed feelings about it as you do, and no more information to add except that once, on a visit to Dublin Zoo, I saw a seriously psychologically disturbed polar bear, an image that I have never forgotten and that kept me away from zoos for years. At that time the Dublin Zoo was small and the polar bear enclosure consisted of a concrete "cave" and a small concrete pool. The polar bear swam back and forth, back and forth, in a hypnotically monotonous pattern, for hours and hours and hours. Apparently that's all he did. He really barely had room to swim, so he'd push off with his back feet, float to the other end, flip over, and push off again. I saw his eyes. I have never seen such a combination of torment and absolute numbness in any creature's eyes since then. He was clearly so deeply miserable that life had no meaning for him other than his pathological attempt to hypnotize himself into oblivion. In contrast, on a visit to China two years ago, I visited the Chengdu panda reservation and saw many apparently happy pandas in large enclosures filled with trees, plants, platforms and lots of bamboo shoots. They were playing with each other, eating calmly, and looking at us with as much curiosity as we looked at them. For the most part. In one area of one of the enclosures, one of the pandas was pacing. He looked frustrated and disturbed. I didn't find out if he had been brought there from the wild and knew that he was in captivity, though perhaps that was the reason for his grief.

[Dave]

Good post, Beth. I think you've captured the way many of us feel about zoos. Yes, many zoos do incredibly important conservation work, much of it now focused on preserving habitat. Few people, let alone the wildlife biologists working for zoos, are happy with the prospect of a world were the only large animals that survive are there because we have made a conscious decision to spare them. We're almost there, but not quite. There are still a some truly wild areas left.

[rr]

Very interesting. Yes of course the environmental angle is the key but in some parts of the world (ok, Africa, which is the only area I really know even a little about) the struggle at the micro level is sometimes between humans surviving or animals surviving. And I have met conservationists who will voice the opinion that it is the humans that should not survive. Which smacks to me of inter-species eugenics. And is an opinion found on the lips of the foreign white "experts". Who do not for one moment envisage their own starvation, forced relocation, sterilization or other inconvenience. And this isn't just to "save" big or cuddly or cute creatures. I heard it voiced most recently in the context of small freshwater fish.

I too have seen a captive polar bear, in London zoo, many many years ago. It was entirely insane in the way tarakuanyin describes although in this case its self-comforting mechanism was to stand on its hind legs and sway back and forth. Polar bears are certainly extremely difficult to keep in captivity. And conserving them in the wild does not involve moving a specific group of people out of the way. It involves halting the global warming which is destroying their habitat. There is a very informative sequence in the recent BBC series "Planet Earth" which follows a single polar bear and watches him die as, exhausted by a mammoth swim necessitated by the shrinking of the polar ice, he is unable to catch any food.

Sigh.