the dark side of plans to save them from extinction

Of the beefy pandasa male and a female, arrived from China to the National Zoo in Washington. If everything goes as planned, they will end up having babies.

Exchanges like this help turn giant pandas into the face of conservation all over the world.

The panda program was created with the aim of saving a much loved species in danger of extinction. Zoos would pay up to $1.1 million a year per pair, helping China preserve the animals’ habitat.

Following carefully developed breeding recommendations, Zoos would help improve the genetic diversity of the species.

And one day, China would release pandas into the wild.

But an investigation of The New York Timesbased on more than 10,000 pages of documents, found that Chinese authorities and U.S. zoos they made up a program pink who struggled, and often failed, to meet those goals.

The documents, photographs and videos – many of them from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution– offer a detailed and unambiguous history of the program. They show that, from the beginning, zoos saw in panda cubs a way to get visitors, prestige and sales. And they got it.

Currently, China removed more pandas from the wild than it released, according to the Times. No cubs born in American or European zoos, or their offspring, were ever released.

The number of wild pandas remains a mystery because the Chinese government’s count is considered erroneous and politicized.

Along the way, some pandas were injured.

As they are very capricious animals when it comes to mating in captivity, scientists turned to assisted reproduction. This killed at least one panda and caused vomiting and injuries to others, according to records. Some animals were partially awakened for painful procedures.

In China, pandas blinked while They were anesthetized and inseminated up to six times in five daysmuch more than what experts recommend.

According to experts, breeding in American zoos contributed little to improve genetic diversitybecause China often sends animals abroad whose genes are already well represented in the population.

Yet American zoos are clamoring for pandas, and China is eager to provide them. Zoos get attention and assistance. Chinese breeders receive monetary bonuses for each puppy, according to records. At the beginning of the century, 126 pandas lived in captivity. Today there are more than 700.

Kati Loeffler, a veterinarian, worked at a panda breeding center in Chengdu, China, during the early years of the program. “I remember being there with the cicadas screeching in the bamboo,” he says. “I realized, ‘My God, my job here is to turn panda welfare and conservation into economic benefits.’”

Loeffler, who spent part of her time in Chengdu as an intern at the National Zoo in Washington, said scientists there used anesthesia excessively and carelessly. On one occasion, he broke protocol and climbed onto an examination table to cradle an animal while it was anesthetized.

Kimberly Terrell, who was conservation director at the Memphis Zoo until 2017, said, “There was always pressure and the implication that the cubs would bring in money.” He pointed out that Zoo administrators insisted on inseminating an aging female panda every yeardespite concerns among zookeepers that it was unlikely to succeed. And he never had it.

“The people who really work every day with these animals, who understand them best, They were quite opposed to these procedures”, he stated. The zoo says its breeding activities met all program requirements.

He Times collected key documents and audiovisual materials of the files of Smithsonian and supplemented them with materials obtained through open records requests.

The treasure, spanning four decades, includes medical records, notes from scientists field and photographs and videos that offer crucial evidence of breeding procedures, side effects and the conditions in which the pandas were kept.

They demonstrate that the most risky techniques were applied at the beginning of the program, but that aggressive breeding continued at the National Zoo and in other institutions for years. A panda died in Japan during sperm collection in 2010.

And Chinese breeding centers, until recently, separated puppies from their mothers so that the females would come into heat again.

Pandas arrived in San Diego this summer, and more will likely land in San Francisco early next year. There are some in a steamy safari park in Indonesia and in a heated dome from Qatar. In China there are so many in captivity that new tourist attractions are being built.

This proliferation sparked debates among zoo workers and scientists about whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospects of being released into the wild.

But those discussions played out largely in private, because researchers and zookeepers say they criticizing the program could harm your ability to work in the field.

Veterinary medicine is always risky, especially with wild animals. When an animal’s life is in danger, The benefits of intervening outweigh the risks.. And when a species is on the brink of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.

But in the case of pandas, Zoo managers take risks again and again simply to have more babies.while hiding the grimmest details from the public.

At the center of this story is the National Zoo, which is part of the Smithsonian. Pandas have been part of the zoo’s image since 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon exchanged a pair of musk oxen for two bears after his historic trip to China.

But he Smithsonian hid the reality of artificial breeding, sometimes in collaboration with the chinese propaganda apparatusrecords show.

American zoos say keeping and breeding pandas expanded scientific understanding of the species. “Critical intervention, including conservation breeding, was necessary to the survival of giant pandas”says the San Diego Zoo in a statement.

Western money and attention also coincided with expansion of nature reserves and the tightening of logging regulations in China.

A National Zoo spokeswoman, Annalisa Meyer, acknowledged that efforts to release them into the wild were “still in development,” and said that the success of the program It could not be measured by the number of free animals.

He stated that pandas in zoos are “insurance against extinction” and that their safety is a top priority.

Having pandas in zoos also shows that people around the world love the species and want to protect itsaid Melissa Songer, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian.

Pandas in captivity are stubborn breeders. Females are fertile, at most, three days a year.. Males can be aggressive or incompetent mates.

But, in one of the great ironies of the program, the desire to save them may be making it difficult to reproduce them.

Records show that zoos have long known that keeping them in captivity makes them less likely to mate. Giant pandas in zoos often exhibit a “loss of normal behaviors leading to reproductive failure,” the National Zoo wrote in an early research proposal.

Heather Bacon, a veterinarian at the University of Central Lancashire in northwest England, says it’s humans who set the conditions.

“We choose how they reproduce. If they don’t want to breed, we force them to do so.“says Bacon, director of the Bear Care Groupwhich works closely with zookeepers. “And the justification is always, in quotes, conservation. Is that a genuine justification?”

“Because the only thing we are doing,” he added, “is produce more pandas to live in captivity and have those same experiences over and over again.”

The panda program was supposed to solve the abuses. In the 1980s, China sent pandas to foreign zoos, where they rode bicycles and pushed carts like carnival attractions. Many had been captured in freedom. It was necessary a demand for US regulators to intervene.

After years of negotiations, American zoos and the Chinese government reached an agreement, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enacted regulations in 1998. Zoos could rent pandas for a decadeallocating the money to its conservation.

American and Chinese scientists also agreed to study panda breeding. The captive population showed signs of inbreeding. Assisted insemination efforts had failed.

So in the late ’90s and early 2000s, scientists from the National Zoo, the San Diego Zoo and other institutions traveled to Sichuan, China. Archive photos and records reveal details of journeys that were rarely talked about, but that laid the foundations for breeding around the world.

Since 1995, More pandas were removed from the wild than were released, according to the Times. Forestry workers say they pick up injured or abandoned pandas. Once in captivity, many were added to the breeding program.