On breeding and pandas

breed·ing  

/’brēdiNG/

Noun The mating and production of offspring by animals. The activity of controlling the mating and production of offspring of animals.

Around ten years ago, I was on a bus on the way home from work, heading back to the area of East London where I lived at the time. A group of young lads, a few years younger than me, were sat behind me having a loud and, for the most part, inoffensive conversation about a girl they all liked. Apparently she was beautiful and they were all vying to take her out. After a while, and just as I was arriving at my stop, the banter started to go from complimentary to derogatory. As I got off the bus, one of the boys began talking about wanting to “breed” the girl they all had their sights on. From what I could gather, he didn’t want to have children with the young lady but was using “breed” to describe the act of sex. It’s a phrase which really stuck with me and it was the one thing that that I found genuinely offensive in an otherwise quite childish conversation.  It gave the distinct impression that this young lad saw sex as something you did to someone else, not with them. It implied objectification. It implied non-consent. 

Of course, as the dictionary definition of “breeding” states, this is exactly the way in which the term is understood when it comes to non-human animals. People “breed” animals all the time - it is accepted that breeding is something that we do to animals in addition to something which happens naturally between them. However, when this same use of term is applied to humans, as it was during that conversation on the bus ten years ago, I believe many people would find it as objectionable as I did.

This was brought to mind for me yesterday when I heard that Tian Tian, the female panda at Edinburgh zoo had failed to mate naturally with Yang Guang, the resident male panda. Now we can never know what motivation Tian Tian might have had for choosing not to mate with Yang Guang. We don’t know what a panda thinks or feels when she chooses a mate. The zoo claimed that Yang Guang was doing all the right things to elicit mating and his advances were spurned by his unwilling partner.

Perhaps putting normally solitary animals on display for zoo visitors to stare at day-in and day-out had an effect on Tian Tian’s willingness to mate. Perhaps living in a confined and unnatural zoo enclosure meant she was less receptive. Perhaps she felt that Yang Guang was simply not the right panda to father her young. Perhaps it was something entirely different; we will never know, because we cannot ask Tian Tian how she feels about it. We can perhaps assume though that, judging by her actions, becoming pregnant now is not something that is right for her. 

Sadly, the zoo’s desperation for the pitter patter of tiny panda paws meant that they did not simply accept that the time wasn’t right and instead they chose to sedate Tian Tian and artificially inseminate her. In this instance, “breeding” is not something which has happened naturally between two animals who have selected their mates but is something which is being done by the zoo to Tian Tian. 

It’s not just pandas that are “bred” in this enforced manner. Elephants in zoos have been manipulated in the same way, as have rhinos. Zoos argue that this is necessary to protect the species but animals born in zoos rarely go back to the wild. In fact, only two pandas born in captivity have ever been released to the wild. The first, Xiang Xiang, was killed and the second, Taotao, was released late last year. It remains to be seen if he will survive. If Tian Tian does fall pregnant and her baby survives, he or she will be the property of the Chinese Government and must be sent to China after two years. And so the cycle will begin again.

I have long been against the panda deal. The money, the political undertones, the shameless promotion of every last detail of the pandas’ lives and the dubious conservation claims all leave a bad taste in the mouth. Notwithstanding my overall opposition to zoos, the panda deal stands out as a particularly objectionable example of how animals are exploited for monetary gain. After all, the Scottish Government admitted that this was not, as the zoo claims, a conservation project but was “primarily a commercial transaction”. Given the precedent already set, and of course the fact that the zoo has been taking every last opportunity to talk publicly about their plans for panda cubs, I was not surprised by yesterday’s news, but I was saddened.

That final piece of control that Tian Tian had over her life which, for all we know, she may have exerted knowingly or consciously has now been taken away from her – just as any chance of ever living in freedom, without thousands of prying eyes on her every day, has already been taken from her.

If Tian Tian does turn out to be pregnant, I can see little reason to celebrate.