The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China's Political Animal by Henry Nicholls

Author:Henry Nicholls
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781605981888
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2010-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

26. Zoologist Devra Kleiman at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo with Ling-Ling in 1982.

In time, behaviour and vocalisations would also give an indirect measure of how comfortable the animals felt in their enclosure. Up until the early 1980s, the custom-built panda pavilion had been sparsely furnished, with few places to climb and nowhere to hide, or, as Kleiman describes it, ‘the golf course type of facility where there was lots of grass and not much shelter’. With an interest in ways to enrich the lives of captive animals, this was of particular concern to Kleiman. So when Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing’s enclosures received a radical makeover that gave them far more opportunity to climb, perch and hide, conditions more akin to those found in their natural habitat, Kleiman compared the pandas’ calls and activities before and after the redesign. There was a dramatic change, says Kleiman. ‘I was able to document a decrease in the frequency of aggressive and threatening vocalisations and the pandas began to play together much more frequently,’ she says.

But even with the animals communicating better with each other, being brought together at the right moment and living in a more natural setting, the National Zoo had also been working on ways to give Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling a helping hand.

Several years earlier, the scientists at the National Zoo had raised the possibility of trying to get sperm from Hsing-Hsing. Although he looked in good health, they wanted to be sure his testicles were ticking over. Then, of course, if they succeeded in collecting sperm and freezing it, there was always the possibility of inserting it, at the appropriate moment, into Ling-Ling.

Artificial insemination is remarkably routine today, but in the late 1970s it was virtually unheard of. In the thirty years between then and now, the scientists at the National Zoo have attended to an impressive range of endangered species—black-footed ferrets, elephants, the Sumatran tiger—working out the best way in which to get sperm from them. This is not always easy. ‘We are often talking about species that are dangerous, if not homicidal,’ says David Wildt, who worked on the Nixon pandas alongside Kleiman and is now head of the Center for Species Survival at the zoo. For such creatures, a standard manual manipulation is out of the question. There are other methods, such as the artificial vagina offered to a male or vaginal condoms inserted into the female before copulation. But if none of these methods is a turn-on to the male, there may be no option but to electroejaculate.

Warning. Electroejaculation involves putting your target male under general anaesthetic, inserting an electrode into his rectum and slowly cranking up the voltage. All of these steps can injure the animal and may even be fatal, particularly if your male is the first of his species to be subjected to the procedure. In China, scientists had already started to experiment with electroejaculation and artificial insemination of their pandas. But Beijing Zoo’s early success with natural mating, resulting in Ming-Ming in 1963, proved hard to repeat.

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