There is great excitement in zoological circles about the birth of twins to a giant panda named Mei Xiang at the National Zoo in Washington DC.
Pandas aren’t usually born in pairs. In fact, it’s amazing that we still have pandas at all. The creatures are fussy eaters — they munch on a specialised type of bamboo which has so few nutrients that they basically have to eat all the time at the expense of other activity — they are lazy, and they are very bad at breeding. So bad, in fact, that it’s really only IVF treatment that has kept the species going. The treatment has such a low success rate that Mei Xiang was inseminated by sperm from two donor males to increase her chances if becoming pregnant.
The one thing between the giant pandas and oblivion is the simple fact that they are cute. So cute that every zoo in the world wants one — or preferably a breeding pair, if they could actually convince two of them to mate in the normal way, that is. (They either don’t find each other particularly attractive, or they just couldn’t be bothered.)
In any case, China has exploited demand for pandas by only lending them to foreign institutions rather than giving them away, as it did in the hey-day of “panda diplomacy”. There are not a lot of them to go round, and China doesn’t want to lose control of a valuable asset.
However, at the same time, keeping a species safe from extinction just to create zoo exhibits hardly seems to be an efficient use of resources. Surely other at-risk species could be saved with the money spent on pandas. Maybe it’s about time the lumbering giants starting paying their own way.
This is a subject my colleagues and I were kicking around during some rare down time at work. Perhaps, we decided, the best way to ensure the survival of pandas is to commercialise their existence, in the same way we have done with cattle, sheep and other farm animals. We may still have to use IVF to help them breed, but economies of scale will come into play.
As one colleague noted on Facebook: “If you care about pandas and want to see more of them, there’s a simple solution. Eat pandas.”
