Posted on 05/24/2008 4:52:48 AM PDT by Gremlinn
A FOREST police team rescued 40 wild giant pandas in Wolong National Nature Reserve in earthquake-hit Sichuan Province at 11am today, Xinhua news agency reported.
The Wolong reserve is a large reserve area for the giant panda, an animal considered a national treasure because it is unique to China.
China yesterday said 86 giant pandas at the China Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center, which is near the earthquake's epicenter in Sichuan's Wenchuan County, are safe.
All panda cubs had been transported to safety, the Wolong center reported to the State Forestry Administration by satellite telephone after being out of contact for 30 hours.
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake, the worst natural disaster in three decades in China, has so far killed more than 12,000 people.
China has more than 1,590 pandas living in the wild in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. Their fate is still unknown.
Sichuan, the worst-hit province, is home to 75 percent of wild pandas while Shaanxi has 17 percent and Gansu 7 percent.
great post
ditto!!
Cute pics!
Why would “wild” pandas require rescuing from an earthquake?
Presumably earthquakes are a natural event that would have been happening for millions of years of the panda’s existence. Wobbly ground shouldn’t prove too much of a threat to a wild animal, I would have thought...
Good question. Another might be, once out of "the wild" for an extended period can they really be returned? The pictures are cute but I don't believe that these pandas are going back to the woods.
“The pictures are cute but I don’t believe that these pandas are going back to the woods.”
....me neither...I think they’re quite valuable...the first ones at the National Zoo in DC and were a huge attendance booster....the Chinese may be able to charge to loan them to zoos.
> The pictures are cute but I don’t believe that these pandas are going back to the woods.
I read something somewhat sinister into all of this. The ChiComs are nothing if not Mercenary Opportunists, and their approach to Wildlife has tended to be “everything that isn’t Medicine is on the Menu”...
...ergo these Pandas are either destined to be harvested for parts, or they will have a pricetag of, say, $100,000 per copy and will end their days in private zoos in Beijing or Moscow. The “earthquake” was merely the convenient excuse that some well-connected ChiCom General or Party Official was looking for to “rob the cookie jar”, so to speak.
I do not trust the ChiComs on sight, and distrust as ingenuous their motives, by definition.
“Panda rescue” my arse!
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