Experts test "panda porn"
Sky News, Nivember 23, 2006
Scientists in Thailand think they may have discovered the key to the notoriously difficult business of getting pandas to mate - panda porn.
Experts in Chiang Mai say the unusual initiative has led to a baby boom among one of the world's most beloved but endangered animals.
Zhang Zhihe, a leading Chinese expert on the giant panda, said the boom was down to showing uninitiated males DVDs of other pandas mating.
Mr Zhang said: "It works."
The panda porn is one of many techniques tried over the decades to get captive pandas to mate.
The efforts to understand and simulate conditions for mating and raising cubs have paid off in China, the panda's native habitat.
Now comes the next test - getting the trick to work outside China.
The day of reckoning will come in January, when Prasertsak Buntragulpoontawee hopes to bring off a successful mating between male Chuang Chuang and partner Lin Hui in Thailand.
The saucy audio-visual approach "is the same idea as chimpanzees seeing people smoke and then copying it", says the Thai researcher.
Among the roughly 20 pandas outside China, no cubs were born this year through mating, Zhang said.
But, at a US zoo in September, artificially inseminated sperm yielded an offspring.
