CHENGDU GIANT PANDA BREEDING RESEARCH BASE(767 views)

Release date:2009-08-25 09:55:41

It has to be said that for a species with a wild population around 2,000, the Giant Panda receives perhaps an undue level of attention. It is the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund, moreover was pretty much ubiquitous at the recent Olympic Games and is, apparently, by an enormous amount, the most expensive animal for a zoo to keep, five times the price of an elephant.

Since I was in Sichuan which is (alongside a few parts of Gansu and Shaanxi) the home of the ‘large bear cat’, and my family were on their way to visit, I was charged with the task of providing some kind of viewing. Short of heading off with a few sticks of bamboo on our own great trek into the Sichuan mountains, a quick internet search revealed that 80 or so of the under 300 captive pandas are residing in the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, a thirty minute drive from Chengdu city centre.

Having had a previous experience of captive pandas in Chiang Mai Zoo, I was torn between apprehension about seeing thirty versions of those two desolate and incongruous animals, against what was promised by a ‘research base’; maybe something approaching the Sichuan wilderness. The guidebook description as ‘10km from downtown Chengdu’ did not exactly raise my hopes, and my spirits were no higher when our taxi pulled up at the side of what I could only describe as your standard wide Chinese inner-city road. The motley collection of street sellers’ shouting faces, ‘panda, panda’, ‘panda!’ ‘Panda?’ confirmed, however, that we were most certainly in the right place.

From this inauspicious start however, overall impressions were to get better and better. If you want to see wild animals then this is not the place to come; the clue is in the name; these pandas have been bred in captivity in an effort to increase their population, while at the same time researching their behaviour. And there is at least some sense of a struggle by the base to find some sort of balance between the research and the tourism. Pre-warned by some that it might take some effort to actually spot a panda, adept as they are at climbing, I was prepared for peering into the branches with my long-lens. The promise at the entrance that there was a possibility to ‘hug a panda’ seemed to throw some doubt on this proposition. And on reaching the first enclosure, a crowd of around 50 multinationals had gathered, all having been informed that it was nearly lunchtime. The bell for lunch rang and out onto the red carpet trotted a posse of around five or six giant pandas, accompanied by a flicker of flash bulbs and a few screams of delight. They sat down in a row and in a perfectly civilised manner, focused their enormous eyeholes on strands of bamboo, affixed the claws and began to eat. After I had endured a few minutes of desperately trying to take a picture which did not include somebody’s baseball cap, the crowds thinned and people moved towards a different enclosure, while the bamboo provided was gradually and dexterously decimated by the great paws.

The area of the centre is around 106 hectares of wood and water, and as we wandered around the winding pathways, the giant pandas, red pandas and golden monkeys gradually become more prevalent, and tourists more scarce. However it was on seeing the centre of the breeding and the nursing of two newborn giant pandas that the other, non-visitor-orientated, aim of the base became clear. And the videoed image displayed of this tiny five week-old cub just gave a pinprick to the senses of how vulnerable this creature is.

And that is the overwhelming impression that was left on me by the centre, that of vulnerability. It seems like one big play-pen, with bouncy floors and cushions, to give some protection against a species nature seems to be against. A 99% diet of bamboo, itself declining in number and low on nutrition, baby’s one six-hundredth of the size of the adult, and a persistent reluctance to try to breed the babies just gives the sense that maybe this is a kind of Jurassic Park for these oversized teddy-bears.

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