Postcard: Wolong

By Simon Elegant, Jodi Xu / Beijing

Hua Mei just wants to be left alone. But a couple of scientists at the Wolong Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda keep poking her with long bamboo poles. Hua Mei, who is in heat and (biologically, at least) ready to mate, gets another prod, pushing her in the direction of the neighboring cage where her putative partner, Wu Gong, is watching with placid indifference. Hua Mei reluctantly decides to cooperate and, raising her tail, pads delicately backward toward Wu Gong. The male panda takes one look at her proffered hindquarters and scoots over to the far corner of his cage. Turning his back, he sits down and begins munching on a stalk of bamboo.

Wu Gong is not the only one rejecting China's panda breeding program, in which scientists have deployed everything from panda porn (films of the animals mating) to Viagra (the drug didn't work) in their attempts to get the notoriously sex-averse animals to make whoopee. Last year, with 34 panda cubs born, was the best ever for China's artificial breeding program. But environmentalists now wonder how necessary the breeding is. Back in 1975, with the pandas near extinction, China set aside 10 nature reserves for the bears, covering almost 2.5 million acres. That move, plus years of global publicity for the panda's plight, has helped China's wild panda population grow to a stable 1,600 bears.

The health of the population also calls into question the center's practice of reintroducing captive-bred pandas into the wild. The fate of 4-year-old Xiang Xiang, a former Wolong resident, has added to the controversy. Having had his every need anticipated by a loyal band of caregivers, the baffled bear received the shock of his young life last spring. He was dropped into the middle of thick bamboo forest, making him the first giant panda bred in captivity to be released by Chinese scientists into the wild. Although he had received some survival training, Xiang Xiang soon found he had been left in a very rough neighborhood. In late December forest wardens noticed from his radio-collar tracker that he wasn't moving. The bear had been bitten by a wild panda in a fight for territory; Xiang Xiang was eventually found, treated and sent back into the wild.

Sadly for Xiang Xiang, the tough love backfired. In a subsequent encounter with a woods-wise cousin, he tried to escape by climbing a tree. Evidently that wasn't part of survival training: the bear fell and, from what rangers could gather, probably broke a leg. Rangers haven't been able to find Xiang Xiang, whose radio collar may have malfunctioned when he fell. Still, Zhang Hemin, director of the Wolong center, insists his charge had to be banished. "We did not want to keep Xiang Xiang because that would have shown our experiment had failed," he says.

Maybe producing pandas and then tossing them into the wild doesn't make sense. According to Jim Harkness, the former WWF chief in China, a range of factors drive the breeding program, notably "the myth that captive breeding will save the panda." The program is a source of national pride; plus there's the fuzzy economics: zoos donate money to China in exchange for the right to display pandas. In the U.S. four zoos, including the National Zoo in Washington, are each paying $10 million over a decade for their Wolong-bred bears.

Zhang denies that the breeding program is aimed at raising revenues. He notes that the government restricts the number of overseas groups the Wolong center can supply with animals, and says all donations are used to expand protected areas and for research. And Zhang insists that reintroducing pandas into the wild will help sustain populations over the long run. "It is not responsible for anyone to declare that the experiment is pointless," Zhang says. Maybe Wu Gong should put down that bamboo stalk. A less pleasurable ordeal could await him in the wild.