Peering into the obsaire and (as some hold) menacing future,
I have to admit that the question, " Will I ever see a giant panda again ?" is not, among the many imponderables ahead, that to which 1 most ardently desire an answer. It does, however, seem odd that it should be a reasonable question to ask, and still odder that the answer is quite possibly " No." The giant panda emerged from the obscurity in which it had had the good fortune to live about fifteen years ago. In the thirties a friend of mine went to great trouble and expense to qualify as the third white man to shoot one ; and about the same time it was suddenly realised that the thing to do with giant pandas was not to shoot them but to bring them back alive. The Chinese authorities put various obstacles in the way of people who wanted to do this, and one enterprising man, - having acquired two in the interior, dyed them brown and shipped them down the Yangtse in the guise of bears ; the dye unfortunately proved poisonous and neither survived. But other efforts were more successful, and most people who saw Ming in the London Zoo probably took it for granted that there would always be a panda in Regent's Park. This is not so now, and is unlikely to be so (I gather) for a longish time. Experience here and in America has shown that after some years in captivity the giant panda is subject to fits which are thought to be due to a deficiency, so far un- diagnosed, in its diet ; in other words, it isn't really a suitable animal to keep in captivity. Even if it were, the successor to Lien Ho (who died, I think, about a year ago) could only be acquired with the consent and co-operation of the Chinese Communists, who are about as likely to help us catch a giant panda in Szechwan as they are to ask us to play them at cricket. STatx.
Previous page
