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.
It is hard to imagine a worse deal, but it is one that few western zoos will spurn. For they will give almost anything for the prestige and popularity that pandas confer. Edinburgh Zoo may publicly criticise people for having an anthropomorphic attitude to pandas, but it encourages it nevertheless. Apart from letting us know that their Chinese names mean, respectively, ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Sweetie’ (do they really?), it would have us believe that for all their mutual indifference and apparent frigidity they are romantic old things at heart.
It seems odd that bears from the remote bamboo forests of China, solitary and territorial in their instincts, should respond to the kind of stimuli that are supposed to promote sexual activity in sentimental humans. Yet, if the Daily Express is to be believed, ‘Zookeepers have sprayed sensuous scents through their houses, the lights have been dimmed, and easy-listening station Smooth FM has been pumped into their pens around the clock.’ If the experts really think that pandas respond to this kind of thing, I am surprised that they don’t tart up their austere indoor living space, reminiscent of a medieval kitchen, with scented candles, satin cushions or whatever.
We will soon know if all this has worked. Tian Tian is about to experience her once-a-year, absurdly brief period of fertility, and Yan Guang is said to be showing signs of excitement by doing handstands. Much may depend on the outcome. In 1974, I worked briefly as a reporter for ITN, and my very first job was to interview the prime minister, Edward Heath, in the panda cage at London Zoo. He, like Richard Nixon before him, had been given two pandas by Mao Tse-tung as a gesture of goodwill, symbolising a thaw in their relations. But the pandas didn’t breed, and Heath lost office. So this is now Alex Salmond’s chance to preside over the first birth of a panda in Britain.
If it happens, he will surely make the most of it. ‘Scotland’s panda’, he will call it; more evidence that Scotland doesn’t need England to get ahead. And it is not inconceivable that it will help the cause of Scottish independence by creating a patriotic, feelgood atmosphere in the run-up to the referendum. Against that will be the feelgood atmosphere created throughout the United Kingdom by the birth of a future king or queen. But I fear that the Scots may prefer the panda cub.
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