Insight
- Bear with Us: It's All About Pandanomics
December 5, 1999 ; Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times, South Africa
In this season of goodwill, of festive cheer, of shopping malls blitzkrieging customers with disco versions of Christmas carols, spare a kindly thought for grief-stricken Washington D.C. The US capital this week is mourning the death of Hsing-Hsing, the world's most famous animal.
I have never been to Washington, so I don't know much about its National Zoo or the conditions there in which this panda lived its whole life. But at the time of its death of kidney disease last Sunday, some 60 million visitors had filed past Hsing-Hsing's place of confinement.
Not surprising, then, that there has been - excuse me - a pandemonium of eulogies at its passing. The Washington Post, for example, this week claimed that "sweet-natured" Hsing-Hsing, the most "cuddly" of all creatures, "enchanted" and "enthralled" zoo visitors.
"The world needs all the teddy bears it can get," the newspaper noted. Even more nauseating, the Post also suggested the creature was a wonderful "diplomat" between China and the US.
Sort of. Hsing-Hsing and a female partner, Ling-Ling (who died in 1992), were given to the US as a gift by Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in 1972. In return, the Americans gave the Chinese a pair of musk oxen.
The Chinese, it seems, got the better deal. Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling were, it must be said, a pair of retards.
Blame the zoo. Confinement usually has a drastic effect on wild animals' behaviour and their personalities. It depresses them. Pandas, on the other hand, have no personalities as such to depress, and their behaviour is really limited to eating bamboo shoots and sleeping. Even so, pandas do know enough to realise that the best place for them is not behind bars but in the wild up the side of some Chinese mountain.
One would have thought their zoo-keepers would have realised this as well, especially after observing the animals' pathetic attempts at mating.
Never having learnt about it the proper way - that is, in the wild up the side of some Chinese mountain - Hsing-Hsing went about Ling-Ling with as much expertise as a seven-year-old who has been eavesdropping on the older boys in the school lavatories: he first tried her ear and then her arm. (Little wonder, then, that a frustrated Ling-Ling once attacked a keeper, gnawing on his ankle.)
A male panda was then imported from London Zoo to impregnate Ling-Ling, but he ended up mauling her instead, so that project was abandoned.
Hsing-Hsing eventually got it right, fathering five cubs between 1983 and 1989. All died within days. Ling-Ling sat on one. Another died after picking up a urinary tract infection from her mother. All of which proves that the best way to further endanger an endangered species is to remove them from their natural habitat and smother them with good intentions.
Of course, the drawback to keeping pandas in their natural habitat (and ensuring their survival by preserving their environment) is that you can't charge a fortune to see them at the local zoo.
And, deary me, the world does love to see a panda. Pandaphiles describe them as "perfectly symbolic animals". Cute in the fur department, clumsy of movement, goofy of features, they're a natural for endangered species activists' public relations departments who have cultivated their image of child-like innocence and vulnerability.
For real child-like innocence and vulnerability, however, one need look no further than the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, whose mien, vulnerability wise, would no doubt be vastly improved if the world cared half as much about the Chinese occupation of his homeland as they did about pandas.
The fact that President Thabo Mbeki bowed to Chinese pressure urging him not to meet the Dalai Lama, in the country to attend the Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town, is a case in point - and a mild one, really, when compared to that of Western leaders who, for all their blather about making the world unsafe for dictators, remain silent when it comes to Chinese involvement in Tibet.
The hypocrisy is not hard to explain. It's about trade - lots of it - and Hsing-Hsing's death offers an example of how swiftly the Chinese have coped with the concept of market forces.
Call it pandanomics, but there's none of that goodwill and largesse that Chairman Mao bandied about in 1972.
The National Zoo is begging China to replace its pair of dead pandas. This China will gladly do - in exchange for 8-million, or almost R50-million, for a 10 year loan.
This is a discounted offer, possibly made in sympathy with the zoo at this time of its grievous loss. China's normal rate for pandas is 1-million per pair per year. (The zoo's counter-offer? A pathetic 2.5million.)
In the meantime, the Smithsonian Institution has announced it has plans to stuff Hsing-Hsing for public exhibition. Not necessarily better than the real thing, of course, but nevertheless an ideal opportunity to stretch an extra buck from a dead panda.