A Thai zoo will show its star residents, a pair of young giant pandas, “porn” videos to teach the famously sexually inactive animals how to mate, an official said on Tuesday.
“We have to encourage them to mate, and the videos will show mating positions of male pandas and female pandas,” said Kannika Nimtragol, a veterinarian at the Chiang Mai zoo in northern Thailand.
Six-year-old Chuang Chuang and his five-year-old partner, Lin Hui, who arrived at the zoo in 2003 on a 10-year loan from China, are becoming “like a brother and a sister” as they live together, Kannika said.
“We have to make them a boyfriend and a girlfriend. So we will put them in separate rooms next week. Chuang Chuang can only see Lin Hui when she shows signs of feeling amorous,” she said, adding that the zoo will show the couple the videos in December.
Kannika said Chuang Chuang showed no interest when Lin Hui became ready to mate in January last year. “Like other male pandas, Chuang Chuang is only interested in eating, sleeping and playing, but not mating. This is the big problem,” she said.
Giant pandas, notorious for their low sex drive, are among the world’s most endangered animals.
Their traditional homes have been the mountains of central and southern China, as well as Myanmar and Vietnam.
But according to experts, their numbers have fallen to less than 1 600 in the wild, mostly in the mountains of Sichuan province in China’s south-west, as their natural habitats have been destroyed by humans.
Just more than 180 more pandas are in research centres in China, with a handful of others in zoos around the world. — AFP