Pandas take rocky road to parenthood

Like many normal young couples starting a life together, Huan Huan and Yuan Zi have moved into a new home, happily go about their daily business, and hopes are high for a baby.
But nothing else is normal about them. Their residence costs more than a million dollars a year, 10,000 humans come to gawk at them every day, and bitter failure has met most of the chosen few who took the rocky road to parenthood before them.
Not that any of that bothers Yuan Zi (“Chubby” in Chinese) or his female partner Huan Huan (“Happy“), or the hordes of tourists who are thrilled by the indolent exploits of the giant pandas in Beauval zoo in the French countryside.
Yuan Zi, as if to show his indifference, took a break from munching bamboos in morning sunshine to turn his rear end toward a crowd of excited onlookers and, to cries of delight, produce a large, shining, green deposit.
“They eat 35 kilos of bamboo a day and defecate about 30 kilos a day,” explained zoo director Rodolphe Delord, as he hosted yet another media crew reporting on the “pandamania” that erupted since they arrived in January.
The pandas are monitored round the clock by security guards and surveillance cameras. Huan Huan and Yuan Zi, who have just reached maturity at the age of four, came from China’s panda conservation center in Sichuan province and are in Beauval on a ten-year loan.
The pair are in France as another example of “panda diplomacy” — China’s bid to use “soft power” to boost its image and strengthen diplomatic ties with a country by loaning the popular bears.
There is immense pressure on Beauval to ensure that the couple produces offspring. The section of the zoo where they are kept has an optimistic sign declaring that it is the “Conservation and Breeding Center of Giant Pandas.”
But captive pandas are notorious for their reluctance to breed. Some of the more extreme methods used to get pandas to copulate have included showing them videos of other bears mating and even supplying the male with Viagra.
Here in Beauval the zookeepers are taking a more scientific approach. They take frequent blood samples and carry out other tests to make sure they don’t miss the mere 48 hours a year during which Huan Huan will be fertile. The bears live in adjacent but separate enclosures from which they can see but not touch each other, and as soon as it looks like the female is ready, zoo staff will open up the barriers to let them hook up. “We mostly keep them apart because if they get too familiar with each other, then they tend to lose interest,” explained Delord.
, adding that if nature does not take its course then they will try artificial insemination.
There is no guarantee that a cute little panda cub will result from the Beauval pair’s first coupling, as was illustrated earlier this year when Britain’s only pandas failed to mate during their brief window of opportunity.
It was “close, but no cigar,” Edinburgh Zoo said, after Yang Guang (Sunshine) mounted female panda Tian Tian (Sweetie) several times, without full mating taking place.
Huan Huan and Yuan Zi meanwhile carry on with their daily 14 hours of feeding, blissfully unaware that here in Beauval they embody the claim in George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm” that all creatures are equal, but some are more equal than others.