The Whole World Goes Pandas

By Gerald Clarke

He had good news for New Yorkers, Mayor Edward Koch said last week: taxes were being reduced, and the police department was being enlarged. "But the single thing people will care about," he added, "is that the pandas have come to town." How right he was. Last Thursday morning, as a gong was sounded and a comely female named Yong Yong waddled into her enclosure at the Bronx Zoo, New York City was gripped with that well-known but incurable fever: pandamania.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK, PANDAS, said a handmade sign held up by one of several dozen waiting schoolchildren. HELLO, LING LING AND YONG YONG, said another. And even more to the point: NEW YORK IS THE PANDAS! Before Ling Ling (Ringing Bell), the male half of the team, and Yong Yong (Forever and Ever) go home at the end of October -- they are on loan from the Peking Zoo for only six months -- an estimated 2 million people (2,000 an hour) will have seen and no doubt fallen in love with them. "There's something special about pandas," says Koch. "They bring people back to their childhood."

Even the meanest people, those who kick dogs, throw bottles at cats and step on robins' eggs, get teary-eyed and putty-legged when they see a panda rolling around on its ample posterior, twisting its puffy body into a seemingly impossible position, or eating an apple -- nothing more exotic than an apple! -- with its handlike paw. "I can't think of any animal that compares," says William Conway, director of the New York Zoological Society. "People love penguins, but the interest in pandas is extraordinary. There appears to be an innate response of, 'Oh, isn't it cute?' "

At the seven zoos outside China in which they have taken up permanent residence, pandas are always the top act. If the adults cause a stir, their babies cause chaos. When Tokyo's Ueno Zoo had a blessed event last year, 270,000 people suggested names for the little cub. Tong Tong (Child) was the eventual choice, and 13,000 stood in line for the first glimpse of that particular child. Another 200,000 a day called the "Dial-a-Panda" hot line to hear him squealing.

In Washington, the only U.S. city that has pandas on permanent exhibit, schoolchildren send them yearly valentines. When the female (also named Ling Ling) fell ill in 1982, she received thousands of get-well cards; some admirers tearfully called for the latest word on her condition. China lent a pair to the Los Angeles Zoo in conjunction with the 1984 Olympics; attendance more than doubled, and pandamaniacs endured three-hour waits. San Francisco's zoo, where the couple went next, saw attendance jump 50%.

But Ling Ling, Yong Yong and the other actors in what might be called China's Traveling Panda Act -- two more will be lent to the Netherlands' Beekse Bergen park this month -- are meant to do more than entertain. Pandas also carry a message: they are an endangered species with a bleak future. Only a few, 700 or so, still roam the mountains of central China, and there are not enough in zoos to ensure their survival.

Like most other endangered species, the pandas are a victim of what Conway terms the "inexorable increase in human beings." Chinese farmers have chopped down many of the bamboo stands that once fed them, and the pandas have been forced to ever higher ground and smaller spaces. But bamboo is not very nutritious (90% is water), and pandas must eat as much as 40 lbs. a day to maintain their cuddly look. Actually, they love meat, but nature has made them too slow to catch anything worth nibbling on. So they are left with bamboo, which moves only with the wind.

The hapless animals are also bedeviled by what many other species -- rabbits, for instance -- would consider an unhappy sex life. Solitary by nature, they rarely enjoy one another's company. During their stay in New York, for instance, Ling Ling, who at 1 1/2 is too young for mating anyway, will never be allowed out at the same time as the six-year-old, heavier (187 lbs., vs. 119 lbs.) and presumably more aggressive Yong Yong.

One answer to the pandas' plight is obvious: the Chinese should give them more space and more bamboo. In recent years the Chinese, with considerable financial help from panda lovers worldwide, have tried to do that. They have set aside twelve reserves that have different varieties of bamboo; if one kind dies out, the pandas will not starve to death, as at least 138 did during a major bamboo famine in the mid-'70s. Indeed, Conway, whose zoo has taken a lead in preserving endangered species, gives the Chinese high marks. "They're spending more effort on pandas than the U.S. is on grizzly bears, which are even rarer in the Lower 48 states," he says. "They're an example to us."

But high marks may not be good enough. Unless reserves are made larger, he says, and connected so that their denizens can move from one to another, "the demise of the panda is predictable." He adds, "There are probably fewer pandas extant than there are Rembrandts. We ought to give them at least as much reverence as we give the works of man." The crowds cheering them on at the Bronx Zoo last week seemed to be doing just that.