salamanders, crocodiles, herons, musk deer, black bears, golden coin turtles, and cobras.24 Though many are nominally listed as conservation centers, their true purpose is evident from their location. Half of the farms are sited not where the animals live in the wild but near the main two markets for traditional medicine and exotic food, Guangdong and Guangxi.
Wildlife has been caught in a pincer between traditional medicine and modern development. The government offers little protection from either. Bureaucratic efforts at conservation are stymied by weak laws, fragmented oversight, and the long-standing belief that nature needs to be managed.25 Few people seem to accept that the best way to let animal populations recover is to leave both them and their habitats alone.
I saw just how intrusive the alternatives could be at the most celebrated conservation park in China. The Wolong Nature Reserve was a four-hour drive from Chengdu, mostly through dense mountain forests.26 It was dark before I reached my hotel. On the approach I caught glimpses of steep river gorges and broad reservoirs in the moonlight, but it was only as I watched the sun rise the following morning that I appreciated the true beauty of the setting. It was early autumn, the hillsides were dappled with red and gold, and the crisp air was filled with birdsong.
The forests here extend hundreds of miles to the stunning opal rock-salt pools of Jiuzhaigou. In this beautiful, biorich area, the famous botanical explorer E. O. Wilson made seed collections between the wars that transformed British gardens with new varieties of azaleas, buddleia, peonies, hydrangea, magnolia, aster, and columbine. It is also home to black bear, takin, golden monkeys, musk deer, blood pheasants, minivets, rock squirrel, and black- and red-striped swallowtails.27
But by far its most famous resident is the giant panda. For most of the late twentieth century this epitome of bestial cuteness seemed doomed to extinction. Yet Wolong’s scientists were boasting that they had brought Old Black Eyes back from the brink. I met the man who claimed to have saved the world’s most famous endangered animal. It was a shocking introduction to the hard-core realities of modern animal husbandry.
Zhang Hemin was known as the “Father of Pandas,” a nickname that revealed more about his paternalistic relationship with the animals than his formal title, director of Wolong Nature Reserve Administration. Bespectacled, moon-faced, and engagingly enthusiastic, he gave me a warm welcome as soon as I arrived at the research center. Zhang told me he had good news: the panda was no longer in danger because he had mastered a breeding technique with a near 100 percent success rate. As a result, the problem was no longer a shortage of pandas but of space.
To prove his point, he took me to the nursery, where there were too many newborns for the incubators, so three or four tiny cubs dozed on blankets on the floor. Next door, the pandagarten was similarly crowded with ten one-year-olds vying playfully for the top spot on a tree branch. More mature pandas had to be rotated between the spacious forested enclosures on the hillside and the narrow concrete pens close to the entrance. As we wandered among them, Zhang said his target was a captive population of 300 by 2016 (up from 120 in 2006), which would guarantee the survival of the species for at least a hundred years.
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.28 How, 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.29 Animal 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.30 This generates suspicions that the breeding center was yet another rare-animal farm.31 That 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.32 Many studies suggest panda inadequacy is a myth, that the animals breed without difficulty in the wild,33 and 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.34 But 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.35 But 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.36 More 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
