Let’s be honest, pandas just aren’t properly equipped for modern life

THE ‘breeding pair’ of giant pandas that I watched descend in cages from a Boeing 777 at Edinburgh Airport on a freezing December day in 2011 are now almost twothirds of the way through their ten-year exile from China.

I hope they are enjoying their stay here in Scotland and the bamboo they eat all day every day to the exclusion of almost all other activity except sleeping and going to the toilet is to their satisfaction.

And, if there is anything which can be done to make the remainder of their stay more comfortable, I hope they won’t hesitate to find a way of communicating it to their keepers at Edinburgh Zoo, which already pays China £600,000 a year for the privilege of having them as guests.

It is, after all, not Tian Tian or Yang Guang’s fault that they have been a disappointment to us – or that the zoo’s director of pandas Iain Valentine quit this week, possibly in disappointment too. The species has been disappointing itself for many decades.

Indeed, if you think about it, it is precisely because pandas are so terrible at making babies that they are so rare. It is because they are so rare that they are coveted by zoos which will pay millions to have them cross oceans and be terrible at making babies in their countries too.

It’s at least a little ironic, then, that such enormous sums are paid with one key expectation in mind – that the pandas will successfully make babies.

Failure to do so, you may not be surprised to hear, is not entirely unheard of among socalled breeding pairs dispatched overseas by the munificent Chinese in return for pots of cash and favourable trade deals.

Long before our two breeders touched down in Edinburgh there were tales of panicking zoo bosses in the US looking for fresh parleys on their panda rents.

‘If we can’t renegotiate they will absolutely go back,’ declared Zoo Atlanta chief executive Dennis Kelly before the miraculous patter of tiny paws – twin ones – finally soothed tempers.

Downturn

‘Year three is your breakeven year,’ warned his colleague Chuck Brady at Memphis Zoo. ‘After that, attendance drops off and you start losing vast amounts of money.’

This week, some months into year seven, Edinburgh Zoo announced there would be no attempts to encourage Tian Tian to make babies when the two or three days a year she is capable of conceiving come round in 2018.

It was a decision which I imagine came from a fairly dark place for the 105-year-old Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. Visitor numbers have fallen from 784,000 in 2012 – the first full year of panda tourism – to 519,000 last year. With no prospect of a cub this year at all, a further downturn looks inevitable.

Yet I feel certain it is the right decision.

For five consecutive years the increasingly desperate attempts to coax this nonnative animal to reproduce – whether in the interests of pandakind or Edinburgh Zoo ticket sales – have left many of us decidedly queasy.

The early years at least brought some levity as male and female met in their enclosure’s ‘love tunnel’ and wondered absently if there was something they were supposed to be doing there.

Their encounters became more comical and, on an evolutionary level, more tragic the more pairs of hands were required to encourage them to do what even educated fleas have managed for billions of years.

Alas, this pair simply couldn’t perform in the brief window their species allows for reproduction.

And the reason for this, as we have discussed, is not because we were sent a couple of duds but rather because the species itself is faulty. Completely useless at fulfilling the one fundamental imperative of all viable lifeforms – self-perpetuation.

As visitors to the zoo have observed in the past seven years, giant pandas do not cover themselves in glory in other areas of life either.

Not as smart as the average bear, they miss the fact they are supposed to be carnivores and feed on bamboo which is unsuited to their digestive systems and so low in nutrients that they have to spend 16 hours a day sitting on their bottoms gnawing at it.

That leaves little time for exercise – not that PT is a top priority in the wilds of the mountainous Sichuan province where the panda no longer has natural predators to keep it on its toes.

Oblivion

In short, Tian Tian and Yang Guang are perfectly decent examples of a species singularly lacking in life skills and staring down the barrel of evolutionary oblivion.

That giant pandas have come this far in history at all is thanks only to the heartmelting anthropomorphic style with which they sit and chew on the wrong food.

If this species is to make it, let it not be because females in zoos around the world were subjected to invasive insemination procedures until finally, through the powers of science and crossed fingers, they carried a cub full term.

Let it be because of natural breeding programmes in China, the only land where the creatures truly belong.

It’s been emotional; it’s been educational, but I look forward to the day our pair get to see the old country again.

But, for the remainder of their time in Scotland, can we get off their cases about babies?