How we saved pandas from extinction as the rest of nature collapsed - Vox.com

On a chilly spring day in 1966, zookeepers in London loaded a giant panda named Chi-Chi onto a commercial plane. The aircraft was bound for Russia. Chi-Chi was bound, you might say, for love. She would soon arrive at the Moscow Zoo to meet a slightly younger male named An-An, the only other captive giant panda living outside of China at the time. The goal was to get the two bears to breed.

To prepare for Chi-Chi's departure, British European Airways removed about 30 seats in the front of the plane. The panda was carried aboard in a crate and separated from 37 passengers by a screen. Flight attendants sprayed deodorant to try and vanquish the scent of the 235-pound bear. For lunch, the attendants served passengers a side of bamboo hearts in Chi-Chi's honor.

Chi-Chi leaves London for Moscow on March 11, 1966.

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The media breathlessly covered the long-distance love affair. Yet it was doomed from the start. When the bears first met in Moscow, An-An attacked Chi-Chi and zookeepers had to separate them with brooms, one newspaper reported. The pandas stayed in separate cages that summer. In the fall, keepers arranged another meeting, but this time, Chi-Chi "slapped" An-An in the face. Soon after, Chi-Chi returned to London, prompting headlines like "From Russia ... Without Love."

Although attempts to breed Chi-Chi and An-An failed, they marked the start of a massive, global campaign to breed pandas in captivity. It was fueled by a sense of urgency: The giant panda population was dwindling. In southwestern China, the only place on Earth where the animals live, human development was destroying forests, and pandas were being plucked from their land and placed in zoos. In the 1980s, only about 1,100 bears remained, down from a historical population that scientists believe once numbered in the tens of thousands.

As pandas started vanishing from the wild, they grew into powerful symbols of the movement to conserve the natural world. As the plight of wildlife was making headlines, pandas — clumsy, big-eyed bears that look like plush toys come to life — emerged as the perfect mascot to rally support.

The World Wildlife Fund, an influential environmental organization, helped formalize the animals as icons when it chose the panda as its logo in 1961. Chi-Chi, An-An's wouldn't-be mate, was the inspiration for the design. (WWF, now known internationally as the World Wide Fund for Nature, chose the panda, in part, because black-and-white logos were cheaper to print.)

As pandas shot to stardom, China, the US, and zoos around the world fueled the captive breeding campaign with tens of millions of dollars in veterinary research. China also created dozens of forest reserves to protect the bears. In 2018, the country announced plans to combine many of them into a single habitat three times larger than Yellowstone National Park.

Giant panda cubs rest in a tree at the Shenshuping Panda Base in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China in April 2022.

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These efforts have unquestionably paid off for pandas. Scientists learned from Chi-Chi and An-An's platonic exchange and, in time, they nearly perfected the difficult art of panda breeding and husbandry. That's the only reason you can see them in zoos today.

The bears are also recovering in the wild. The most recent estimates indicate that more than 1,800 pandas now live in southwestern China, and their numbers are increasing. That trend prompted the country to announce, in 2021, that pandas are no longer endangered. (The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the global authority on endangered animals, delisted pandas in 2016.)

Imagine that: The panda, the very symbol of endangered species, is no longer endangered.

But if giant pandas are mascots for endangered species, then their team is, so to speak, losing. In the time that environmental advocates were saving pandas, much of the rest of the planet's wildlife continued to deteriorate. The world now faces an unprecedented and accelerating crisis of biodiversity loss, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. Forests are quieter. The oceans are emptier.

The story of the panda is, in a sense, a story of success. Tales of rebounding animal populations are rare. But it carries with it a warning: The model of conservation that lifted up pandas won't work to save everything else.

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The global effort to save giant pandas is rooted in our collective obsession with these bears. It dates back to at least the 1930s, when a New York City socialite journeyed East.

The only pandas on American soil back then were stuffed bears in natural history museums. But in 1936, a dress designer in NYC named Ruth Harkness traveled to China in search of a live cub. She was trying to finish what her late husband, William Harkness Jr., had started: Months earlier, the young explorer died from cancer on an expedition to capture a panda and bring it back to the US.

One November morning, Mrs. Harkness and her local guide heard squealing by the stump of a large spruce tree in the mountains outside of Chengdu, Henry Nicholls recounts in The Way of the Panda. There, she found a baby panda no larger than a kitten. The cub was perhaps less than two weeks old.

"I stood for minutes in a trance," Harkness, known for her deep voice and bright red lipstick, told a reporter in 1937. "I had discovered a most precious thing — a tiny offspring of one of Mother Nature's greatest and rarest mysteries in the animal kingdom."

She named the cub Su-Lin and took him back to New York City on a steamship. He was an instant hit. "Wherever she goes, Mrs. Harkness lugs her 10-pound jewel along in a traveling basket," the Daily News wrote at the time. "The infant panda has viewed the interior of some of New York's best restaurants since its arrival."

Ruth Harkness holds Su-Lin in her room at the Hotel Biltmore in New York City in 1936, shortly after returning from China.

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What makes animals like the panda so popular? Maybe it's their looks, their striking appearance, cute and fearsome all at once. Pandas also exploit our parenting instincts. Cubs have round faces with big cheeks, and they tumble about like helpless toddlers. (We also tend to like what we can relate to. Fellow mammals with arms? Sure. Freshwater mussels? Not so much.)

Harkness eventually brought Su-Lin to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, where the cub — the first live panda in the US — drew a record 53,000 visitors on the first day he was displayed.

It was China, however, that turned the bears into a global sensation.

In the 1970s, the Chinese government began sending wild-caught pandas around the world as state gifts — a sign of goodwill and friendship, historian Elena Songster wrote in her 2018 book, Panda Nation. There was even a term for it: Panda diplomacy.

"Giant pandas served the Chinese government as invaluable tools for putting a friendly face on China," Songster wrote. "These fuzzy creatures thawed Cold War tensions and promoted the idea that warmer relations with the inscrutable Communist power could be possible."

Most famously, China gave two pandas to President Richard Nixon in 1972 after a series of successful peace talks. The bears, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, flew to DC on Air Force One and were taken to the National Zoo "under security measures as tight as if they had been Chairman Mao," the New York Times reported. (In exchange, the US sent China Matilda and Milton, a pair of musk oxen with some kind of skin condition.)

American pandas were as famous as any celebrity. Two decades after Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling arrived, China sent the US two more bears, Shi Shi and Bai Yun, this time to the San Diego Zoo. News helicopters filmed their high-security motorcade as if they were heads of state.

"Make no mistake: That phenomenon that zookeepers call 'pandamania' is back," the LA Times wrote in 1996. "No animal in the history of US zoos brings the crowds and the awe-struck response of pandas."

Photographers get close-up photographs of a giant panda eating bamboo shoots and leaves at the Bronx Zoo in New York circa 1947.

Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images

Pandamania was good for zoos and for China. It wasn't necessarily good for wild pandas.

In the 1980s, China stopped giving away pandas as state gifts but began loaning them out for a few months at a time, often at the expense of the wild population. George Schaller, then director of science at a large environmental organization called the Wildlife Conservation Society, criticized these short-term loans as "rent-a-panda" programs.

"I have a nightmare vision of evermore pandas being drained from the wild until the species exists only in captivity," he wrote in his 1993 book The Last Panda.

In those years, pandas were facing other pressures in their homeland. Mines and human developments in Sichuan Province were replacing forests. Meanwhile, pandas were running out of food — stirring up fears that the world's most beloved animal might soon go extinct.

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Pandas, like humans, are technically omnivores. About 6,000 years ago, however, they stopped consuming meat, for the most part. Today, pandas almost exclusively eat bamboo.

While bamboo grows abundantly in China, it has a few critical shortcomings. Like celery, it doesn't have many calories, so pandas have to spend half of the day eating. Plus, they can't put on enough fat to hibernate in the winter like other bears.

Bamboo is also a somewhat unreliable food source. Every so often, at seemingly random intervals, entire hillsides of bamboo stalks flower, produce seeds, and die.

Normally, only one or a few bamboo species might flower at the same time, so pandas can just forage for other varieties if they need to. But in the '70s, multiple species died all at once, according to Songster, causing the bears to starve. By some estimates, more than 100 died. Then in the '80s, bamboo forests flowered and died once again, fueling concerns that pandas were at risk of extinction (not to mention reports that pandas were looting food from peoples' homes).

Although it's not clear whether the second bamboo die-off actually harmed many pandas, it helped ignite the global campaign to save these animals — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

China and groups such as WWF relied on two main approaches. One was to establish a system of protected areas that prohibited hunting, logging, and other harmful human activities, as China has done. Another was to build out a massive breeding operation, the likes of which the world had never seen.

One-month-old panda triplets rest as they receive a body check at the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, China, in August 2014.

Kin Cheung/AP