PHOTOS: PRESS ASSOCIATION, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/AMI VITALElist was the fact that pandas (appear to) have big
eyes; that they sit up vertically like us and have
no tail; they are playful and round; and they lack
any obvious sexual features that “embarrass
the human eye and work against the animal’s
popularity”. According to the authors, pandas
spent millions of years of going it alone on their
own evolutionary journey, and then they hit
the publicity jackpot simply because natural
selection happened to produce a creature that
we humans consider cute and unthreatening.
That was all it took.
The rest was history. We responded to news
of their downward spiral by showering them
with concern and cash. And we still do.
Today, panda conservation is big business.
Although official financial figures from China
are hard to come by, wild panda conservation
is aided in part by the rental costs of captive
pandas, which are housed in zoos around
the world at a cost of hundreds of thousands
of pounds each year.
Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo, for instance, pays
£600,000 annually for the privilege of housing
two pandas named Tian Tian and Yang Guang.
Extrapolating up conservatively, the contribution
to wild panda conservation from captive pandas
in zoos comes to over £20m each year.
Are pandas worth it, then? Is all of that money
being well spent? That depends. If your definition
of success is the reintroduction of captive-bred
pandas to the wild, then the answer is probably
no. In 2016, Hua Yan, a two-year-old panda
bred in captivity, became the sixth panda to
be released back into the wild, and that’s after
50 years of effort. No real success there then –
or at least not yet.
But, if your definition of success is about panda
numbers in the wild, then, yes, undoubtedly,
there is reason to be cheerful, for wild panda
numbers appear to be rising at last. In 2003,
there were only 1,600 wild pandas remaining.
Now, 14 years later, there are nearer 1,850 –
an increase of 16 per cent. In fact, as ofSeptember 2016, giant pandas are no longer
considered officially endangered, they are
now listed as merely ‘vulnerable’ by the IUCN,
the global record-keepers of the fates of
dwindling species. Thanks to a marked decrease
in poaching and an expansion in the species’
protected habitat, the future of China’s wild
pandas looks more secure than before.
It is likely that this trend will continue,
so one could argue that the conservation money
has been a great success. A species has been
saved, by us – or at least by those people who
visited zoos to gawp at captive pandas, or gave
money to the international wildlife charities
that represent them.STEALING THE LIMELIGHT
But £20m or more each year. That’s a vast amount
of money. Could that cash be better spent
elsewhere? After all, there are many other species
far more threatened than pandas on the IUCN’s
list, few of which may be granted more than
a few thousand pounds between them in terms
of conservation money.
What about the Nubian flapshell turtle,
for instance – a funky-looking reptile whose
numbers have fallen by 80 per cent in just two
generations? Or the Kurdistan newt, which is
restricted to just four streams in an area covering
less than 10sqkm? Or my personal favourite,“In 2016, Hua Yan became
the sixth panda to
be released back into
the wild”
Conservation
Science
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