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When the eminent field biologist George Schaller studied pandas in the wild in the 1980s, he found that the best way to attract them was to bait their traps with goat meat. I’ve seen footage of a wild panda chowing down on a dead deer. “Panda eats Bambi” is decidedly not a Disney feature. The first pandas landed in the U.S. just before World War II. First came a roly-poly baby named Su-Lin, meaning “a little bit of something cute,” then Mei-Mei, her “little sister,” and finally a potential beau named Mei Lan. But the pitter patter of tiny panda feet was not forthcoming, which was hardly surprising, given that all three were male, the zoologists later discovered. A similar fate befell the Bronx Zoo’s “breeding pair,” which arrived to much fanfare in 1941. Pan-dee and Pan-dah were not a little boy and girl but two females. In the days before genetic testing, sexing pandas proved to be a notoriously difficult art, since the panda penis is virtually indistinguishable from female genitalia. Breeding animals in captivity is rarely easy. A concrete enclosure is not a sexy place for a wild creature. As with most animals, the desire of pandas to procreate is stimulated by a complex set of cues—the animal equivalent of a nice glass of wine and a bit of Barry White. In zoos, two pandas are expected to mate in isolation. But pandas are anything but loners when it comes to sex in their natural habitat. The winning male celebrates his victory by having sex over 40 times in a single afternoon. Panda sex itself is a rough-and-tumble affair with plenty of biting and barking. Male pandas are incredibly potent: The semen of the giant panda contains 10 to 100 times more sperm than a human male. The female’s short fertility window—under two days each year—may even be an evolutionary adaptation to control population size, precisely because male pandas are so accomplished at procreating. In recent years, the Chinese have achieved a high success rate in breeding pandas in captivity, primarily through artificial insemination. These “panda mills” are no conservation success story, however. The black-and-white balls of fluff might look like pandas, but raised as they are in a man-made environment, they don’t grow up to behave like pandas. In 2007, a young male named Xiang Xiang, Chinese for “lucky,” became the first captive-bred panda to be released in his natural habitat. He was savaged to death by wild pandas. The real threat to pandas isn’t their incompetence but our mythology. We have bought into the narrative that the only way to save them is for humans to take control. Instead the reverse is true: We need to let the pandas take care of themselves, something they can only do if we leave them with enough forest to live their secretly sexy lives.

— Pandas in captivity vs real  

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