This Sunday sees the long-planned arrival in Scotland of the giant pandas Tian Tian and Yang Guang, destined for a ten-year stay in Edinburgh Zoo, where they will be exhibited from 16 December.
The multi-million pound project has been facilitated with the support of Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, previous Prime Minister Gordon Brown, royal supporters including HRH the Duke of York and HRH the Princess Royal, as well as high-level diplomatic representatives. How desperate Scotland must be for pandas.
It is not for OneKind to comment on global diplomacy, but we do know a little about modern animal welfare. And in this context, while the use of pandas as diplomatic gifts may be a Chinese tradition dating back over 1,300 years, it is impossible to see what the animals have ever gained from it.
The transportation of two sentient animals thousands of miles to be kept in captivity and seen by a million visitors a year is not going to benefit them as individuals. No matter how high the quality of their new enclosure, no matter how excellent the viewing and monitoring facilities, the pandas inside will still be denied the ability to roam free, to forage and feed as they like, to avoid or associate with companions, and to follow their instincts in selecting a mate.
The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland has acknowledged in the past that the pandas “are not animals as far as the Chinese are concerned, they are diplomatic gifts which reflect a good relationship between China and another country”, but argues that its own aim is one of conservation. The zoo will facilitate veterinary dental and oncological research using the two animals, as well as aiming to get them to breed.
The latter will be a challenge: panda breeding in zoos has a low success rate, can involve considerable human intervention, and the cubs do not always survive - in recent years Dan Dan, in Kobe Zoo in Japan, conceived one cub through natural means and one by artificial insemination, but they both died.
Attempting to hold back the tide of extinction by maintaining a captive population may create a fragile conservation façade, but none of these animals, or their offspring, is ever likely to go back to the wild. The only introduction of a captive bred panda so far ended in the death of the animal, apparently killed by wild pandas.
Surely, genuine conservation means regenerating a sustainable wild population, and that can only take place in the place and the environment where the animals actually live. Surely, conservation means restoring the bamboo forests and supporting the reserves in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces in China where the wild pandas actually live, encouraging local efforts to drive out poaching, and giving the wild population the very best chance to take care of themselves.
OneKind believes that the tradition of using sensitive, sentient animals as diplomatic gifts should have died out with the 20th century - if not before. Nations around the world should stop seeing giant pandas as trophies, and stop competing for them. But then of course we wouldn’t all get the chance to look at them, up close, 600 of us per hour, would we? And honestly, when it comes to keeping Chinese pandas alive, would that matter?