Edinburgh Zoo and the great panda racket

If you have nothing to do, are suffering from stress, and wish to be rendered comatose, I recommend that you get interested in the efforts being made by Edinburgh Zoo to mate its two giant pandas. The zoo has thoughtfully installed video cameras in the pandas’ enclosure so that we can constantly watch them online and marvel at their sloth. I had my laptop tuned to the ‘Panda Cam’ throughout the weekend and checked it from time to time to see what the pandas were up to. The answer was never anything at all except for sleeping or eating. Often there was no panda in camera shot; but when there was, it was always on its own, either sleeping peacefully on what looked like a bed of wood chippings, or lying on its back with bamboos in its paws, happily munching away at their foliage. Never once was there the smallest indication that either panda would have preferred company to solitude.

Pandas are notoriously averse to sexual intercourse, and their breeding record is abysmal. And it’s for this reason that people are far more excited at the prospect of a panda birth this year than of a royal one. The latter can be confidently predicted; the former could hardly be more in doubt. But the difficulty of getting pandas to breed is a challenge that no zoo can resist and that China is therefore able to exploit. Edinburgh Zoo is paying China about £700,000 a year in rent for its pandas; but after ten years it will have to send them home again. It is also meeting the enormous costs of keeping and feeding them — among zoo animals only elephants cost more — and of trying to persuade them to mate. And if against the odds Yang Guang (male) and Tian Tian (female) were to produce a cub, the zoo wouldn’t be allowed to keep it either; for after two years China would claim it back, too.