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Javier E

The Panda Factories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-breeding-death-captivity.html

china propaganda zoo

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • from the beginning, zoos saw panda cubs as a pathway to visitors, prestige and merchandise sales.On that, they have succeeded.
  • Today, China has removed more pandas from the wild than it has freed, The Times found. No cubs born in American or European zoos, or their offspring, have ever been released. The number of wild pandas remains a mystery because the Chinese government’s count is widely seen as flawed and politicized.
  • Because pandas are notoriously fickle about mating in captivity, scientists have turned to artificial breeding. That has killed at least one panda, burned the rectum of another and caused vomiting and injuries in others, records show. Some animals were partly awake for painful procedures. Pandas in China have flickered in and out of consciousness as they were anesthetized and inseminated as many as six times in five days, far more often than experts recommend.
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  • Breeding in American zoos has done little to improve genetic diversity, experts say, because China typically sends abroad animals whose genes are already well represented in the population.
  • Yet American zoos clamor for pandas, and China eagerly provides them. Zoos get attention and attendance. Chinese breeders get cash bonuses for every cub, records show. At the turn 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 program’s early years. “I remember standing there with the cicadas screaming in the bamboo,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh my God, my job here is to turn the well-being and conservation of pandas into financial gain.’”
  • Kimberly Terrell, who was director of conservation at the Memphis Zoo until 2017, said, “There was always pressure and the implication that cubs would bring money.” She noted that zoo administrators insisted on inseminating its aging female panda every year, despite concerns among zookeepers that it was unlikely to succeed. It never did.
  • “The people who actually worked day to day with these animals, who understand them best, were pretty opposed to these procedures,” she said. The zoo said its breeding efforts followed all program requirements.
  • The Times collected key documents and audiovisual materials from the Smithsonian archives and supplemented them with materials obtained through open-records requests. The trove, which spans four decades, includes medical records, scientists’ field notes and photographs and videos that offer crucial evidence of breeding procedures, side effects and the conditions in which pandas were held.
  • They show that the riskiest techniques happened in the program’s infancy, but that aggressive breeding continued at the National Zoo and at other institutions for years. A panda in Japan died during sperm collection in 2010. Chinese breeding centers, until recently, separated cubs from their mothers to make the females go back into heat.
  • This panda proliferation has prompted debates among zoo workers and scientists over whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospect of being released into the wild. But those discussions have largely played out privately because researchers and zookeepers said that criticizing the program could hurt their ability to work in the field.
  • when a species is on the verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.
  • with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.
mrfcafarella

The vanishing animals that future generations will never see  - 2 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ure-generations-will-never-see

shared by mrfcafarella on 22 May 17 - No Cached
  • “But there are conservation success stories. Mountain gorilla populations are increasing and we now have around 800 in the wild. Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroos also seem to be stabilising."
  • In Madagascar there are only around 100 blue-eyed black lemur left
  • In March a rhino was poached from a French zoo, the first time such an incident has ever been recorded, and demonstrating the demand for rhino horn
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  • there are fewer than 100 Javan Rhino
  • pangolins - the world’s most trafficked animal - were also in danger of dying out within a generation.
  • There are only 30 now left in the wild,
  • More than 23,000 species are on the IUCN Red List threatened with extinction, including 41 per cent of the world’s amphibians, 25 per cent of mammals and 13 per cent of birds.
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