In the 1990s, China began sending pandas to foreign zoos to be bred, in the hope that future generations could be released into the wild. It hasn’t gone to plan.
Two chunky pandas, a male and a female, arrived from China in October at the National Zoo in Washington. If everything goes as planned, they will eventually have cubs.
Exchanges like this have helped turn giant pandas into the face of conservation worldwide.
The panda programme was created with the stated goal of saving a beloved endangered species. Zoos would pay up to US$1.1 million a year per pair, which would help China preserve the pandas’ habitat. By following carefully crafted breeding recommendations, zoos would help improve the genetic diversity of the species.
And someday, China would release pandas into the wild.
But a New York Times investigation, based on more than 10,000 pages of documents, has found that Chinese authorities and US zoos have put a rosy sheen on a programme that has struggled, and often failed, to meet those objectives. The records, photographs and videos – many of them from the Smithsonian Institution Archives – offer a detailed, unvarnished history of the programme.
They show that, 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.
Along the way, individual pandas have been hurt.
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 anaesthetized and inseminated as many as six times in five days, far more often than experts recommend.
Breeding in US 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 US zoos clamour 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 centre in Chengdu, China, during the programme’s early years. “I remember standing there with the cicadas screaming in the bamboo,” she said. “I realised, ‘Oh, my God, my job here is to turn the well-being and conservation of pandas into financial gain.’”
Loeffler, who spent part of her time in Chengdu as a scholar affiliated with the National Zoo in Washington, said that scientists there used anaesthesia excessively and sloppily. At one point, she said, she bucked protocol and jumped onto an examination table to cradle an animal as it was being anaesthetized.
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 ageing 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 programme requirements. (Terrell, now a scientist at Tulane University in Louisiana, settled an unrelated gender discrimination lawsuit against the zoo in 2018.)
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 programme’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 centres, until recently, separated cubs from their mothers to make the females go back into heat.
Pandas arrived in San Diego this summer, and more will most likely land in San Francisco early next year. There are pandas in a steamy safari park in Indonesia and in an air-conditioned dome in Qatar. So many pandas are in captivity in China that several new tourist attractions are being built.
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 criticising the programme could hurt their 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 verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.
But with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.
At the centre 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 traded a pair of musk oxen for two bears after his historic trip to China.
But the Smithsonian has glossed over the reality of artificial breeding, at times in partnership with the Chinese propaganda apparatus, records show.
American zoos say that keeping and breeding pandas has expanded scientific understanding of the species. “Critical intervention, including conservation breeding, has been necessary for the survival of giant pandas,” the San Diego Zoo said in a statement.
Western money and attention have also coincided with China’s expansion of nature reserves and stricter logging rules.
A National Zoo spokesperson, Annalisa Meyer, acknowledged that efforts to release pandas into the wild were “still developing,” and she said that the programme’s success could not be measured in the number of animals released. She said that pandas in zoos were “insurance against extinction” and that animal safety was a top priority.
Having pandas in zoos also shows that people around the world love, and want to protect, the species, said Melissa Songer, a Smithsonian conservation biologist.
Pandas in captivity are stubborn breeders. Females are fertile for, at best, three days a year. Males can be aggressive or incompetent partners.
But in one of the programme’s great ironies, the quest to save pandas may be making it harder for them to breed.
Records show that zoos have long known that keeping pandas in captivity made it less likely that they would mate. Giant pandas in zoos often have a “loss of normal behaviors resulting in reproductive failure,” the National Zoo wrote in an early research proposal.
Heather Bacon, a veterinarian at the University of Central Lancashire, in northwestern England, said humans set the terms. “We choose how they breed. If they don’t want to breed, we make them breed,” said Bacon, a director of the Bear Care Group, which works closely with zookeepers. “And the justification for that is always, quote-unquote, conservation. Is that a genuine justification?”
“Because all we’re doing,” she added, “is producing more pandas to live in captivity and have those same experiences over and over again.”
The ‘Sperm Team’
The panda programme was supposed to fix abuses.
In the 1980s, China sent pandas for short stints to foreign zoos, where they rode bicycles and pushed trolleys, like carnival sideshows. Many had been caught in the wild. It took a lawsuit for US regulators to intervene.
After years of negotiation, American zoos and the Chinese government struck a deal, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service issued a policy in 1998. Zoos could rent pandas for a decade at a time, with the money going toward conservation.
American and Chinese scientists also agreed to jointly study panda breeding. The population in captivity showed signs of inbreeding. Artificial insemination efforts had faltered.
So, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, scientists from the National Zoo, San Diego Zoo and other institutions flew to the Chinese province of Sichuan. Archival photographs and records reveal details of trips that have seldom been discussed but that laid the foundation for breeding around the world.
Researchers shot pandas with tranquillizer darts to anaesthetize them, then laid them on stretchers or boards. Bundled up against the cold in spartan concrete rooms, scientists collected semen from the males by inserting electrified probes into their rectums.
They called themselves the “Sperm Team.”
This technique, called electroejaculation, is commonly used in captive breeding. But the scientists drugged some of the animals with unadulterated ketamine, a powerful sedative that veterinarians typically use in combination with other drugs. Ketamine alone can leave an animal anxious and in pain – and partly awake, as a National Zoo veterinarian acknowledged in a presentation at the time.
Some pandas were “light,” meaning they were insufficiently anaesthetized, and apparently struggled.
“Animal was light during entire procedure,” JoGayle Howard, a scientist at the National Zoo, wrote in a journal she kept on a 1999 trip. “Almost came off table at one point (used ketamine only this time instead of ketamine and xylazine).”
“Great semen sample with high count,” she added.
During one collection, Howard wrote that Chinese scientists had quadrupled the voltage to an unsafe 12 volts.
“They used dangerously high voltages and too many stimulations on male Ping Ping after we left,” she wrote. “Male had bloody loose stool and no appetite for months.”
Experts say that electroejaculation should be done cautiously, with minimal voltage. “You can do quite a lot of harm,” said Thomas Hildebrandt, an expert on artificial breeding in animals at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which today owns one-third of the world’s captive pandas, denied ever using excessive voltage or otherwise harming animals. “We have not had any giant pandas suffer health damage or death during surgery due to the use of ketamine,” the centre said in a statement.
Hildebrandt said that artificial insemination should be done once per cycle, after pinpointing the moment a female is most fertile.
But Chinese scientists inseminated female pandas repeatedly. In one experiment, they inseminated seven females, sedated with only ketamine, as often as six times per animal in five days, meaning the pandas were in and out of stupors.
Notes in the Smithsonian archive show that American scientists accidentally injured one panda’s uterus during an examination. Photographs show pandas vomiting. “Difficult anaesthesia,” scientists wrote about a female panda named Lei Lei at a breeding centre in Wolong, western China. “Retching and vomiting. Inadequate fasting – food and water. Procedure cut short.”
Many of the scientists from that era have retired or died, and the National Zoo said it had no records of pandas in China being injured. It said that scientists had limited knowledge about panda reproduction at the time. Meyer, the spokesperson, said this early research period contributed to improved care and a “panda baby boom”.
Notes make clear that the scientists did not intend to harm the animals. They believed they were saving the species. In conservation efforts, the welfare of the species often trumps that of individual animals.
An incentive to breed
For decades, the Chinese zoo association has given US$1400 bonuses to breeding centres and zoos for every cub that lives to six months. Those who make “special achievements” can earn up to US$7050.
The Chengdu centre’s budget last year included targets for pregnancies and cubs.
That creates an incentive to breed animals as quickly as possible.
In 2017, Lung Yuan Chih, then a researcher with Tsinghua University in Beijing, visited three Chinese breeding centres for her dissertation. All three did multiple electroejaculations or fertilizations on each panda selected for breeding, said Lung, who is now a director of the Taiwan Human-Animal Studies Institute.
A healthy species has a diverse variety of genes, making it more likely to adapt to illnesses or habitat changes. That is why American scientists helped create detailed recommendations for which pandas should breed.
Those recommendations were often ignored, records show. Instead, the Chinese centres mainly focused on animals that were easy breeders.
Breeding centres also prematurely separated cubs from their mothers.
In the wild, cubs stay with their mothers for 18 months to two years. During that time, females are unlikely to go into oestrus, or heat. To make the mothers fertile again, zookeepers have taken cubs away much earlier.
“Sometimes the mothers didn’t have any break at all,” said one Chinese former panda keeper who worked on breeding and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal. “They gave birth every year.”
In the mid 2000s, cubs were moved to nurseries shortly after birth. Later, many were placed with “stepmothers” – essentially panda wet nurses.
Pandas give birth to one or two cubs at a time. Chinese panda enthusiasts who monitor webcam footage documented a female at the Chengdu center in 2017 caring for six cubs.
James Ayala, an American behavioural researcher there, said that the centre kept cubs with their mothers whenever possible. Stepmothers are used only when mothers reject their cubs, he said. “Now we know that keeping them with the mum is super, super, super essential,” he said.
Hildebrandt, the artificial breeding expert, said that he had worked with the centre and that practices were improving.
A Times reporter visited Chengdu last month. The centre authorized Ayala to speak but declined to make administrators, scientists or panda keepers available.
During the interview, staff members and local propaganda officials repeatedly interjected to flag topics that were off-limits. Those included the release of pandas into the wild and artificial insemination.
In a recent article titled “‘Electrocution’ of Giant Pandas! Can It Be True?” the zoo says that artificial breeding is harmless.
Don’t make money
When they are old enough, pairs of Chinese pandas are eligible to be rented.
Under the policy governing the rental programme, zoos may not profit from pandas.
But records show that, even as the programme details were being hashed out, money was at the centre of the discussion.
In 1993, zoo representatives from the United States and Europe gathered at the National Zoo to strategize.
The notes from that meeting are full of typos, but they show that zoo administrators were not interested in only displaying a rare species. They wanted cubs, referring to the agreements as “breeding loans”.
“Old males,” said a National Zoo scientist at the meeting, are not “going to bring in as much money as a breeding pair”.
Some attendees acknowledged that shipping pandas around the world did little to protect them. “If we were truly interested in the conservaitonof of the panda,” the notes read, “then we would contribute to them insitu [in the wild] and nont take them out.” [sic]
Today, US zoos must submit audits of their panda-related revenue to the Fish and Wildlife Service to prove that they are not profiting. Pandas are expensive. Beyond rent to China, zoos also have to build sophisticated enclosures and buy tons of bamboo.
But pandas attract big donors.
In 1999, before its last pandas arrived, the National Zoo launched a US$13 million fundraising campaign, which included US$10.5 million for what it called an “education centre.”
An internal document from that period advised employees to deflect a journalist’s questions about the project’s planned gift shop, restaurant, special events area and fundraising offices. The building is the zoo’s “investment in the future of wildlife on Earth,” the document reads. “So that’s why we want to build the ed facility!”
The zoo, a nonprofit, does not charge for admission. But documents show that it saw pandas as a way to “form strong collaborations with area businesses.”
It brokered panda sponsorship deals with Fujifilm and Animal Planet; worked with local hotels to create packages that included zoo donations; and sourced panda mouse pads, golf balls and shot glasses for the gift shops.
Within months of the pandas Mei Xiang and Tian Tian arriving, 1 million visitors had come through the gates.
But the pandas struggled.
Scientists have consistently observed panda “stereotypies,” or behaviours associated with captivity. San Diego Zoo scientists studied 47 captive pandas around the world and, in documents submitted to regulators, said that nearly two-thirds did things like “pacing, head tossing, pirouetting and stereotypic cage climbing.”
Conditions in China during those early years may have made things worse. A San Diego scientist wrote to a National Zoo panda keeper that pandas often had problems arising from what he called their “jail cell” stint in “clearly substandard housing.”
Difficult breeding
As mates, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian were not a great match.
“Tian Tian violently attacked Mei Xiang,” a veterinarian wrote in 2002, after an early mating encounter. Later mating attempts failed.
So staff intervened. Mei Xiang gave birth in 2005 after a single round of artificial insemination.
Subsequent conceptions proved elusive. Scientists began packing multiple procedures into Mei Xiang’s brief fertile window.
Under federal policy, zoos cannot breed pandas simply to make cubs. Zoo notes from that period show that staff were repeatedly reminded that breeding was about science, not cubs.
Administrators tracked the efforts.
“Unfortunately, this was the fourth year in a row that Mei Xiang has not been able to conceive,” the director reported to the zoo’s advisory board in 2010.
The following year was particularly difficult. Mei Xiang vomited after her first insemination. When staff anaesthetized her for the second, about 24 hours later, the dart did not fully discharge. Mei Xiang was darted four times that day, leading to a rough recovery.
Meyer, the National Zoo spokesperson, said that breeding was closely monitored and followed protocol.
In 2011, the zoo announced that if Mei Xiang failed to produce a cub the next year, it might send her back to China.
Mei Xiang ultimately produced four surviving cubs after at least 21 rounds of artificial insemination. Few of the details were made public, and the Smithsonian has refused to release some information about them through an open-records request.
Years later, in 2022, the Smithsonian Channel made a film about her last cub, “The Miracle Panda,” with a company that is part of China’s propaganda apparatus. It presented artificial breeding as quick, effective and minimally invasive.
The zoo spokesperson said that filmmakers who needed access to China were required to work with certain production companies. The Smithsonian reviewed the film for “scientific accuracy,” she said.
Almost immediately after each birth, money poured in.
“Overall merchandise sales have increased dramatically,” reads a 2006 document from the zoo’s fundraising partner.
“Funds much zoo operations, research, education programming,” an employee scrawled on a notepad.
Visitor totals shot up and by 2010, records show, nine out of the 10 bestselling items were panda-related.
Pandas in the wild
One of the great hopes of the panda programme was that someday, animals bred in captivity would be freed to repopulate the wild, like the creatures on Noah’s Ark.
Ten pandas have successfully been released, a number that is touted by China’s national forestry bureau. But nearly as many have died in the process, the Times found in an analysis of news reports. Two died in the wild from attack or infection and another six died in a pre-release programme.
Since 1995, more pandas have been removed from the wild than have been released, the Times found. Forestry workers said they collected pandas that were injured or abandoned. But once in captivity, many pandas were added to the breeding programme, according to records.
The Times counted over a dozen wild pandas that remained in captivity for the rest of their lives, and a dozen more that remain there today. In 2018, China tried to address this by requiring that newly caught animals be released once they have recovered.
The forestry bureau did not answer a list of questions but said that the Times “distorted the reality of giant panda protection and management in China.” The bureau did not respond to a request to elaborate.
Pandas who spend most of their lives in overseas zoos are never freed. Neither are their foreign-born cubs.
When Mei Xiang’s first cub went to China in 2010, the National Zoo braced for questions. “What would be future of Mei and Tian if they go back?” a communications department document reads.
“Where would they go and what would happen to them?” the document continues. “NEED RESPONSE.”
Last year, they got their answer when the pair returned to China with their offspring Xiao Qi Ji.
The parents went to a “retirement” area at a panda centre in Sichuan. With the pandas out of view, rumours swirled about their treatment.
The centre reassured panda fans that they were thriving.
“The online rumours about the panda centre hiding and abusing three giant pandas are seriously untrue,” the centre posted on the social media platform Weibo in May. “Strictly adhere to the truth, reject rumours, respect facts, and distinguish right from wrong!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mara Hvistendahl and Joy Dong
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES