Honestly? Pandas just don’t seem interested in survival

Jonathan Brocklebank

SUKI t he cat was lazing on a lawn in a garden in her native West End of Glasgow when the tom hit her like a train. In a trice he was on top. Oh, so brutish! People had to look away. This, truly, was the behaviour of a beast.

When it was over, my neighbour’s cat gingerly carried on with her afternoon. So did Tom. I doubt if they’ll stay in touch.

While she is i n season, other unneutered males may interrupt Suki’s day in similar ungentlemanly fashion. None of them will stick around for the birth, still less show the slightest interest in which of the ensuing litter may be theirs. That’s how cats swing. It seems to work for them.

Fifty miles away in Edinburgh, Tian Tian the giant panda’s latest travails in the quest to reproduce are the stuff of international news. Will anything work for her? The action (inaction would be more accurate) now continues behind closed doors and off-panda- cam, just in case someone sneezes and causes her to lose the priceless baba of zookeepers’ dreams.

Tian Tian, you will recall from the publicity which preceded her arrival in Scotland, is one half of the breeding pair which China rented out to us in 2011 at a cost of £6million for ten years. Breeding pair – ho, ho, it’s a while since anyone called them that.

Her ‘other half ’ is Yang Guang, a 12-year-old who responds to Tian Tian’s three- day-a-year fertility season with the enthusiasm of a sheep to Shakespeare. Coaxing has brought the pair darned close to doing it, certainly, but there is a point, we must imagine, where even the most hands-on matchmakers rely on nature to take over.

Nature

Yet nature simply embarrasses the pair, exposing them in front of their keepers as f umbling greenhorns who don’t know what to do and don’t much fancy taking the trouble to learn.

So Yang Guang is excused breeding duties for the rest of his stay at Edinburgh Zoo as Tian Tian is wheeched round the back for artificial insemination. If we catch a fair wind, she will neither miscarry nor reabsorb the embryo into her uterus as she managed to do in a bout of stress last year.

Cross enough fingers and the cub, weighing in at one 900th the size of its mother, will be born alive in September. Cross some more and mummy bear will not roll over and squish baby bear, as bumbling pandas are prone to do.

I realise, of course, that there would be no living creature on Earth so cute, so gorgeous, so perfect as Tian Tian’s blind, deaf and hairless offspring by the time it started to see, hear and sprout some fur.

I know he or she would be cuddly, sweet and adorable in ways no turbo-libidoed tortoiseshell tom from Glasgow could dream possible.

But let us be clear about the pitiful newborn – or twins – whose safe arrival would send Edinburgh Zoo’s finances skyward. The i nfant panda is rather less indicative of the idea of birth than of the slow and undignified death of a species with lamentably poor life skills.

For well over a millennium, the Chinese have dispatched these exotic creatures across the world as bargaining chips in a game of international diplomacy. Why? Because they are native only to China and the rest of the world goes gaga for them.

It’s the way they sit on their bottoms and eat bamboo, just like plump toddlers with a toy, and sometimes fall over – ha, clumsy, just like us. It’s those innocent eyes set in black-on-white blotches, daubed by mother nature at her most Warhol-esque…

But even as pandas were feted worldwide as animal kingdom royalty, their natural habitat in China was shrinking, century after century, to make room for people.

There is every reason to suppose that, once upon a time, in an age no one can remember, pandas did just fine in fulfilling the fundamental imperative of all viable life - forms, the continuation of their own species.

If they now sit on their bottoms, chew on bamboo and look as if they haven’t the foggiest idea what they are doing here, it’s maybe because, by doing so with such heartmelting anthropomorphic style, they resist complete extinction.

Tragedy

The giant panda’s tragedy is that he needs to take a long, hard look at himself – and, of course, he cannot. In the mountainous Sichuan province, he has no natural predators to keep him on his toes, so he is out of shape. He has the digestive system of a carnivore, but catching live food is such a chore, so he chases down bamboo shoots instead.

These are so low in nutrients that he has to spend 16 hours a day eating them in between bouts of shut- eye. He is generally too lethargic for sex, which explains the increasingly desperate ploys of zookeepers to stimulate the old boy during that tiny, annual window of his so- called breeding partner’s fertility.

Even Viagra cannot persuade him to do the needful in the interests of panda-kind.

‘It’s because they’re in captivity,’ explain their captors. Caged pandas are ‘notoriously difficult’ to mate.

How goes the breeding programme for wild pandas, then? Their population is estimated at anything from 1,000 to 3,000. There are probably more stray cats in Glasgow’s West End.

Meanwhile, the nation which rents us our pandas remains by far the world’s biggest centre of wildlife crime. Demand for rhino horn is so high there that it is feared the species will be gone by the end of the century.

I would love to see both creatures survive. But my heart bleeds rather more for the illegally hunted and butchered species than the one hopelessly clawing at the brick wall at an evolutionary dead end.

Tian Tian and Yang Guang, surely, are not the only ones sitting and scratching their heads. What, really, are they doing here?