Email
Some call her a cash-cow. Others a golden goose. But to you and me, she’s a giant panda. Britain’s most illustrious panda, Tian Tian, is famous for being pregnant each summer – and infamous for failing to give birth to gorgeous little pandas like everyone wants her to.
Unlike in Washington, DC – where the National Zoo this week celebrated panda baby Bao Bao’s first birthday – a familiar dark brooding cloud settled over Edinburgh, Scotland, after reports indicated that Tian Tian likely miscarried in the late stages of her pregnancy. And, as was the case in the US when their giant panda failed to reproduce on command, the panda cynics are already sharpening their swords.
Screw pandas! say an increasingly noisy element of the media. “Giant pandas should be allowed to die out”, opined TV celebrities. “Unthinkable? Stuff the pandas” blared a broadsheet editorial in the Guardian, while one in the Telegraph painted Tian Tian as a “guzzling single mum” bloated by state benefits, intent on “playing the system”. There is even a nature organisation that has made the pampered panda its bête noire, called The Ugly Animal Preservation Society – and they’re right to try to focus people’s attention on the other, less photogenic, threatened species crowded to near-extinction out of their natural habits.
Despite their more cuddly reputation, child-free pandas still have abuse heaped upon them. They get described as having a “reluctance to procreate”, called an “evolutionary mishap”, labeled as “metabolically ridiculous”. The dismal and almost slanderous misportrayal of their sex lives makes me bitter.
The public is told that pandas have trouble getting in the mood and that females have a window of ovulation too tiny to be practical. Zoo pandas are reportedly even shown sex videos, given Viagra and kept in enclosures are pumped with mood music. Doesn’t this all sound a little ridiculous? Now imagine it from the panda’s point of view.
But evolution isn’t in the business of making duds, after all: pandas are not even remotely sexually incompetent ... at least, not in the wild. Female pandas evolved a tiny reproductive window precisely because they’re so good at getting laid – it is evolutionarily better to invest in rearing their young than prolonging foreplay, after all. Male pandas have one of the highest sperm counts of all the bears (all the better to make sure your offspring are yours and not those of another male), and female pandas attract interest from a host of males from miles around, all of whom track her movements through the smells she leaves dotted around their environment. interloper. Pandas, it seems, are sex-trackers – not porn-watching, Muzak-listening, benefit-sucking lounge lizards.
If wild pandas still sound like inept sexual beings to you, I can only encourage you to undertake a Hunger Games-style trek through an enormous bamboo forest, tracking the scent of your loved one by sniffing every tree in sight, and timing your sexual advances for the exact day in a given year when such interactions will lead to sex and not territorial violence. If you manage to have sex with your chosen partner, I’ll shake your hand – but, if you fail, I’ll label you a sexual comedy of errors and tell everyone you’re not worth the cost of feeding.
We humans are a bit to blame for the sorry state of panda-kind: we expected them to conform to our cuddly, docile vision of them and fill up zoos with their (monetizable) progeny. What we’ve ended up with is a weird, perverted Build-A-Bear Workshop driven, in part, by profit and international chest-beating.
After all, both pandas and Build-A-Bear Workshops involve metal probes (poked into the rectum in the case of male pandas – it makes them ejaculate), and both involve … stuffing. And pandas are an increasingly commercial enterprise like Build-A-Bear – indeed, an endeavour that may never actually result in captive pandas being released into the wild in any great numbers. Meanwhile, China continues to rent out pandas for millions of dollars, and zoos across the world take their cut from the entrance fees and souvenir sales. In that very human way, we took something honest and good and saw an opportunity to make a buck.
So as the fall rolls in – and the panda sex show simmers down until next spring – spare a thought for the pandas and the mighty lust in their loins, hidden behind bars and guarded by well-meaning officials with clipboards. Nature, of course, does Build-A-Bear very nicely given the chance – but not often for a paying audience. If we really want to conserve threatened animals, perhaps we should focus less on their curious reproductive quirks and more on the spaces in which they prefer to make use of them.
;
Comment from the paper
Steve Bell on RBS – cartoon
John Harris: It’s not just Scotland where politics as usual is finished
Gaby Hinsliff: Fat-shaming: how the slim and sanctimonious help to cause our obesity crisis