Saving the Giant Panda

There are not many panda books out there, but this is a great one. There are some wonderful pictures of ZooAtlanta's two bears, as well as other great pictures. It also tells the story of Maple's journey to bring the pandas to Atlanta. In addition, it has some panda facts on it. It would look great on anyone's coffee table.

This is a fine introduction to the Giant Panda, its patterns of life, the complexities of conservation, and the inevitable politics of a zoo trying to work with both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Chinese Government to bring Pandas to the United States.Terry Maple's story alone is amazing and will interest anyone who believes that private interests can perform public services better than government. He is a professor of Primate Psychology at Georgia Tech who has been the director of ZooAtlanta since 1984. He saved a zoo that was run by a city government and was on the verge of disaccreditation by transferring management responsibility to a private association. This has allowed him to move the zoo from a poorly run, poorly managed institution that was not the best environment for its animals to one which has an amazing research focus, which has developed a world class gorilla, orangutan and Mandrill program, and allowed him to set his sights on bringing Pandas to Atlanta. In the process he was also a pioneer in privatizing government run zoos as ZooAtlanta has flourished as a privately run institution leased from the city.Panda ethology is worth studying because it raises troubling questions about lessons we might need to learn about our own species. Consider the implications for overly bureaucratized education for humans while reading the following passages: "Pandas receiving enrichment were much more active in the presence of the test stimuli, and in many cases stereotyped behavior was reduced or eliminated. Enrichment was a strongly motivating condition in the lives of these animals... enrichment keeps pandas active." (p.76) "New social opportunities are often powerful motivators"(p.79) "Baby pandas do not show any signs of independence until the fourth month of life, and they may stay with their mothers into a second year." Research has indicated that they stay "together two and a half years, about a year longer than most researchers thought was the norm". Maple goes on to discuss a variety of lessons being learned about Panda behavior and many of them will stimulate you to think about challenges we face in understanding the best way to raise humans. This book is also an excellent outline of the relationship between conservation in the wild and conservation in zoos and the degree to which both approaches are necessary if we are going to optimize biodiversity - especially for large vertebrates. It is a worthwhile introduction for anyone who cares about conservation in general, pandas in particular or the method by which two countries can combine government and private activities into effective conservation.