Pandas breed in Mexico

Press, 23 October 1984, Page 24

Pandas breed in Mexico

NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Mexico City’s zoo is the only place outside China where pandas have been successfully bred naturally in captivity and its director, Ms Maria Elena Hoyo Bastien, attributes the success to love. Other zoos have produced the animals by artificial insemination but Ms Hoyo Bastien said: “We have played no part whatsoever in the reproduction.” Two of Mexico City’s four pandas were bred naturally from Chinese stock — Pepe, the father, and Ying-Ying, the mother, who were given as cubs by China in 1975. “They came here as babies. They grew up together and they love each other,” she said, adding that love was often an overlooked factor in natural animal reproduction.

Ying-Ying bore three cubs. The first died shortly after birth in 1980. The second, Tohui (“the little one” in Indian dialect) is a healthy three-year-old female. The third, “El Bebito” (the baby), born some 15 months ago, remains nameless as veterinarians have not yet determined its sex, a difficult task since pandas’ sexual organs are deep inside the body. The success is all the more remarkable as Mexico City’s 60-year-old zoo in the Chapultepec Park is small, overcrowded, obsolete and surrounded by a busy city in one of the most polluted places on Earth. Now Mexico needs new panda stock. “We have shown we can do it. Now what we need is China’s help. We want new blood,”

Ms Hoyo Bastien said. She said that the zoo asked China last May for a three-year-old male for Tohui. They would have a year to get to know, each other before sexual maturity. China had not yet replied. According to Ms Hoyo Bastien: “Tohui is a very sad animal. She is very playful but has no-one to play with.” Asked why Mexico City had been so successful at breeding pandas naturally, she said: “It is a miracle of nature, of God, of something above us ... What I can say is we take good care of them, we feed them well.” The pandas get a liquid diet of eggs, milk, rice, apples, carrots, sugar and spinach with chicken or beef, all mixed in a blender. They are fed twice a day

and get bamboo shoots for snacks. Ms Hoyo Bastien said: “We give them a lot of love as well, but really all we had to make sure of was that they adapted to our climate and our diet. All we give them is fresh and we have a bamboo plantation. “I don’t know, Mexico has something, an air of innocence, of humanity. We always work in a very human way, and I think this ensures that we always get positive results with nature,” she said. Perhaps she best summed up Mexico’s success with pandas when she said: “In Mexico everything grows ... If you throw a seed on the ground, a flower springs up at your feet. We have had the great privilege that nature always lives in Mexico.”