Panda Paradise

I was lucky enough to visit the Panda Protection and Research Center at Wolong outside of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. As you see, the Center is located among some pretty spectacular hills..

And in fact those resident there (around 120, though it varies) lead a pretty good life as Joe Six Pack here can testify.

The two chief missions of the place are research and captive breeding. The latter has been spectacularly successful of late says scientist and Assistant Director Tang Chunxiang with a record 36 panda cubs born in captivity last year. Tang warns that there's still an immense amount we don't know about the animals. This little fella, named Mimi, was born recently after spending almost a year inside his mother, well over double the normal gestation period. why? Tang cheerfully acknowledges that he and his colleagues haven't the faintest idea, though they intend to find out.

Tang also dismissed as nonsense claims by critics (see a story I wrote on the issue here) that the rehabilitation program the center has just started that aims at returning captive bred pandas to the wild is mostly justification for the ever-growing breeding program, which incidentally allows the center to collect huge fees from zoos in the U.S. and elsewhere to which pandas are lent. "The breeding program and the research are fully integrated and actually aspects of each other," Tang says, as the case of Mimi demonstrates.

Ok but you've still got to be skeptical. A million dollars a year to rent a panda is a pretty big incentive. And as anyone coming to the center immediately realizes, the massive new road currently under construction will only open up the protected area even more to human encroachment. So if your 1600 existing wild pandas are already being pressed and are likely to be pressed further, well, where';s the space to put the citified cousins?

I shall attempt to upload some video of pandas not mating, something they are pretty good at in captivity. In the meantime, on the grounds you can't have too many cuddly bear pics, here's another.