The Wild East Opinion Desk

There’s something creepy about Chinese people trying to breed pandas. What’s this about showing ‘Panda porn’? ‘Sexercise’ for pandas? I wouldn’t go into oestrus, either, if only out of spite.

China should back off its panda ‘preservation’ programs, stop intervening in panda sex by practically holding the poor bastards’ willies for them when they wanna do it, and set aside additional protected preserves in the wild.

There’s even evidence that the panda population would be better off — and better at propagating — if they were just left to their own ‘devices,’ if you will, in their own natural habitat.

In recent Discovery Channel documentaries on the subject, Szichuan panda ‘keepers’ claim they don’t want certain of their pandas to breed for ‘genetic purposes.’ Their rather diabolical plan is to heavily manipulate a small panda population under their care to meet an ominous-sounding ‘target’. Sounds much like factory production, doesn’t it, although they admitted in the show they’ve “run out of panda enclosures” to expand the program.

My point is this: Lay off, China, and let the pandas get laid, too.

In this execrable scenario, the female pandas are shown being constantly moved in and out of only five pens in the Szechuan program. Fifi, whose name means ‘concubine’ the narrator tells us, and her mate have to be formally ‘introduced.’ At first, she seems keen on him. Wu Gong gets excited after seeing the female; he is usually “the last one in the season to mate.” Fifi is hot to trot– let her out of her cage for Chrissake.

The ‘keepers’ grab the pandas like luggage, by the scruff of the neck, and tear them off the tree. Unbelievable! For sure, this is behavior that is not conducive to mating!?

They shove Fifi into the enclosure. As the pandas are distantly sizing each other up, the ‘keepers’ give him an apple. Here, I’ve got a nice bamboo shoot for you, they say. Smell this, eat that. But why are they TRYING to distract and turn off the pandas, for the love of God? Any one knows that animals — much like humans — are highly unlikely to think about sex when there’s good food around. The two factors are usually mutually exclusive. So why are these ‘keepers’ doing this? (Who the hell knows?)

“If tonight they are ready, we will mate them,” says a ‘keeper’. But that may be way past their bedtime!

At first, things go well, then sour, as Wu Gong reportedly ‘loses his sense of direction’ when he tries to mount her. The keepers rejoice when he finally manages to do her from behind, standing on two legs, a maniacal smile on his face. It lasts 6:29 seconds, they say, a successful mating session, at least from their point of view.

Then again, the tiny genepool of this confounded panda sex camp is a factor ‘keepers’ don’t really seem to take seriously. The regularly producing Studmuffin and Lulu ‘may not be up to the task,’ and ‘mustn’t be overused,’ they conclude. As for Ling-Ling and Tsao-Tsao, they are drafted for a panda blind dating service.

But the ‘keepers’ need RESULTS.  So Chum-Chum is stretchered in. His semen is collected in the clinic; he is a vital if unwilling participant. Disgusting!

No wonder pandas all kind of act like zombie retards — they can barely stumble anywhere, they must be so inbred. And why do you think pandas were adopted as the national symbol? My hypothesis is that pandas are much like the ultimately malleable Chinese ubercitizen, whose decisions and choices in life can easily be usurped by the totalitarian powers-that-be.

Fifi’s anaesthetized — she clearly says ‘Ow!’ with the pinprick. So that they don’t kill her from administering too much sedative, she is first weighed in a small cage, given apples to relax her, then artificially inseminated. She is basically poked, prodded, and raped by the State.

Yinyin’s hormone levels have peaked, so they put her in with Wu Gong. Maybe he’s not so apathetic as he was thought to be about her. But it backfires; he tries to rape her.

With Mi Ching, the situation gets even more violent. When he turns out to be ineffectual, she starts biting him, although he only suffers minor cuts and scratches. During this scuffle, the keepers actually hit them with their poles!

Ling-Ling is the other option but she’s not being cooperative. Shi Mei (Happy Lucky Girl) has been sent, and she’s driving him crazy. Wu Gong walks away from the opportunity, but LuLu steps up to the plate and shows Wu Gong how it’s done. But instead, they play like cubs. So let them!

Most shocking is when the artificially inseminated Fifi eventually gives birth. She is put in a small room and watched ’round the clock until she drops a baby. Immediately, a ‘keeper’ snatches her baby from her! In this scandalous program, since pandas typically have twins and one often dies, both are immediately taken from her at birth so keepers can interchange the cubs at feeding time, to try to keep up the program’s quota of 15 live births a year.

While officials at the Qinling Giant Panda Research Program are dumbly obsessed with  ‘trying to reach their target,’ these idiots don’t seem to know anything about pandas. Each panda needs 3-15 square kilometers of bamboo forest to live comfortably, it is estimated. China wants to increase its panda population to 3,000, but as the show clearly illustrates, when the pandas are left alone in the wild — sans all the sex toys, porn videos, prodding and poking by Chinese ‘scientists’ and experts on panda sex — even they admit it’s more than likely the ‘magic 3,000’ target has already been met — in the wild.

Furthermore, these fraudsters have only just recently realized the importance of climbing trees in the pandas’ mating process. It’s dangerous to approach pandas in the wild, especially when they’re mating, so it’s harder for an exact headcount to be made, but recent attempts to do so indicate their numbers thrive –if people just leave them alone and do their thang.

If China genuinely wanted to increase the panda population, all they need do is set aside and protect more space for a ‘panda preserve.’ Instead, they seem to be engaging in some sick genetic engineering program.

For these animals, who have been around for 2 million years, their survival, the Discovery program claims, is “not just their [the pandas’] responsibility, it’s ours.” Yet I would argue the reverse is more true; in cases like this, humans need to back off and let nature take its course.

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According to AP, only about 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in China’s southwestern Sichuan province. An additional 120 panda are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.

Photo: pandaclub.net, a site where people can watch giant pandas sleeping, eating and playing with each other — through web-cameras — at Wolong Nature Reserve.