ON 7 DECEMBER 1834, THE ENGLISH NATURALIST CHARLES DARWIN LEFT +++ BEAGLE WITH A LANDING PARTY to look around a bay on the island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile. Human beings were an unfamiliar sight here, and so, as Darwin’s colleagues set up their equipment to survey the land and coast, these visitors were of great interest to a local fox. Not just any fox, though, but as Darwin recorded in his journal for that day, ‘a fox (of Chiloe)’ – a local sub-species, in other words. This ‘rare animal’, Darwin reported with some excitement,
sat on the point & was so absorbed in watching their manoeuvres, that he allowed me to walk behind him & actually kill him with my geological hammer.
The past is another country, they say, and they certainly conserved things differently there. There was nothing strange, in the nineteenth century, about killing animals for the love of nature. Familiarity bred contempt, perhaps: people were not so far removed from the realities of stock-rearing or food production as most of us are today, and even the animal-loving British tended to see slaughter as a fact of life.
Naturalists were even more matter-of-fact in their approach to the killing of animals. After all, how else were they supposed to pursue their scientific interests? For in the absence of today’s sophisticated photographic technology, shooting or trapping an animal might be the only way of getting to study it up close. By definition, rare animals are typically hard to find, too: they’re also likely to be timid and aloof and to live in the remotest, most inaccessible areas. Besides, there was then still a sense that scientific understanding began with anatomy: you couldn’t hope to know much about a creature whose corpse you had not dissected. (Conversely, there was less concern than there is today with an animal’s relationship with its environment, with its place in the ecosystem; no one thought to try to understand the animal better by looking beyond it to the world that it inhabited.)
A DEATH WARRANT
One way or another, then, the nineteenth-century naturalist saw nothing wrong with hitting a ‘rare animal’ over the head with a hammer, and so it was with the giant panda. Père David himself hadn’t actually glimpsed his ‘discovery’ alive, and neither did any other Westerner in the years that followed. For decades afterwards, only panda skins were seen, and these were soon commanding astronomical prices in the markets of Beijing.
The race was accordingly on to be the first foreigner to see a live specimen in China. This somewhat unedifying endeavour was conducted in a spirit as much of competition as of scientific curiosity. No one seems to have been concerned that the panda should be appreciated in its natural setting, in its living relationship with its habitat. Indeed, by a macabre paradox, it was clear that the obvious way for the winner to prove his claim to have seen a live panda would be by shooting it dead.
A day’s hunting successfully concluded, an American hunter brings home a bear’s head. Only relatively recently has the taking of such trophies been frowned upon.
Teddy’ Roosevelt conferred great glamour on the concept of the ‘white hunter’, a role model for a certain type of wealthy Western alpha male.
KILLING FOR COLLECTION
There was nothing remarkable about shooting dead a ‘rare animal’ during the nineteenth century. For the kind of gentleman amateur who had led the way in developing the field of natural history, acquiring specimens this way was a kind of extension of the age-old aristocratic pursuit of hunting. That this continued to be the case well into the twentieth century is clear when we consider the life and hunting enthusiasms of Theodore Roosevelt.
‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was not only the twenty-sixth president of the United States: he was also an all-American hero, and, indeed, an all-round alpha male. Before going into politics, he had been a cowboy, ranching cattle and serving as a sheriff’s deputy in North Dakota. And earlier in his public career, he’d taken time out to lead a group of volunteer ‘rough riders’ into battle against Spanish colonial forces in Cuba, triumphing in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. His love of hunting was well known, and it was in honour of a bear that he’d killed on a hunting trip in 1902, during his first presidential term, that a new kind of cuddly toy came into being: the ‘teddy bear’.
Roosevelt’s commitment to the natural world went well beyond rounding up and shooting animals: during his presidency, he doubled America’s nascent National Park Service in size. But he certainly enjoyed hunting, and did so with the full support of his country’s scientific establishment. Hardly had his successor in the White House been sworn in at the beginning of 1909 than Teddy set off for a safari break with his son, Kermit. Landing in Mombasa, on the coast of British East Africa (today in Kenya), they assembled 250 porters and pushed into the interior, ‘collecting’ specimens as they went. Their more unusual finds were destined for Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Institution, but no one was in any doubt that this was a big-game-hunting expedition. Between them, father and son killed over 500 animals during their safari, including 11 elephants, 17 lions and 20 rhinos.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SONS
President Roosevelt died in 1919, and it was with his brother, Theodore Jr, that Kermit Roosevelt embarked on his 1929 expedition to China. They went not just with the blessing of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, but also with its generous financial backing, their stated objective being to bring back a panda skin for the museum.
The expedition didn’t get off to a terribly promising start. After arriving in Sichuan and then setting off into the mountains – where their local guides assured them that they would be able to find the bei shung (white bear) – they tramped for days without seeing any sign of one. One day, however, bei shung tracks were found on a remote hillside. On and on they followed them, tramping for miles, and just when this, too, was starting to seem like a fool’s errand, Kermit was urgently called forward by one of the Chinese guides. He recalled:
As I gained his side he pointed to a giant spruce thirty yards away. The bole was hollowed, and from it emerged the head and forequarters of a bei shung. He looked sleepily from side to side as he sauntered forth. He seemed very large, and like the animal of a dream, for we had given up whatever small hopes we had ever had of seeing one. And now he appeared much larger than life with his white head with black spectacles and his black collar.
Ted came up to join his brother, and together they marvelled at the magnificent beast before them. Yet what else were they now to do, as conscientious collectors, but shoot him dead? With their anxiety mounting as the animal turned and walked away, they ‘fired simultaneously’, noted Kermit, who continued:
Both shots took effect. Not knowing where his enemies were, he turned toward us, floundering through the drifted snow that lay in a hollow on our left … We again fired. He fell, but recovered himself and made off through the densely growing bamboos.
In keeping with his heroic posture as a big-game hunter, Kermit talked up the potential ferocity of the giant panda. Local hunters may, as he admitted, have reassured him of the animal’s harmlessness, but he was keen to make clear that the dogs accompanying them seemed nervous about chasing the wounded beast. In the end, it scarcely mattered, for after following the retreating tracks, the brothers quickly came upon their quarry – ‘a splendid old male’ – lying dead.
Mission accomplished, the panda’s skin was taken back to Chicago for preservation and display. American nature-lovers seem to have shared the sense that the Field Museum had secured itself a very special trophy by supporting the expedition, and that if people in Europe disapproved, it was only because their museums had lost the race to be the first to display a panda.
With their heroically recounted exploits of 1929, Kermit and Theodore Jr, President ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt’s sons, did much to ignite the ‘panda craze’.
A LIVE PRIZE
Other big-game hunters trailed the Roosevelt brothers out to China, and further pandas were killed. The great prize was gradually becoming less exclusive, and by the 1930s, the race was on to bring back the first live panda. One wealthy young hunter, Bill Harkness, was determined to win. Unfortunately, he died of cancer at the age of just thirty-four in 1936, leaving behind his widow, Ruth, his fortune, and his dream. Ruth Harkness, who had stayed in New York while her husband was in China, was not exactly the most obvious wildlife collector, being a glamorous fashion designer, elegant society lady and familiar figure on the Manhattan party scene. Yet she was a great deal tougher and more adaptable than she looked.
Having travelled to Shanghai to fetch her husband’s remains, Ruth resolved to fulfil his greatest ambition on his behalf: she was not going to return home without a living panda. She accordingly organised an expedition with the help of a Chinese–American explorer, Quentin Young. After making their way inland up the Yangtze Valley as far as Chongqing, they went on to Chengdu before heading up into the hills of Sichuan. And there, with the help of local hunters, they caught a nine-week-old cub, which they named Su Lin, in honour of Young’s Chinese sister-in-law.
After hunting pandas, the next challenge was capturing a live one. It is only recently that photographing pandas in the wild has become the goal.
PANDA À LA MODE
The Chinese name Su Lin translates roughly as ‘cute little thing’, and it’s very much a girl’s name. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Ruth Harkness or Quentin Young that their cuddly little captive might have been a male panda. As it turned out, that’s exactly what he was, although this essential fact passed entirely unnoticed in the media extravaganza that accompanied his arrival in the United States. In fact, it didn’t come to light until after his death in 1938, when taxidermists started preparing the body for mounting. Throughout his time as prize exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, Su Lin was therefore unquestioningly assumed to be a ‘she’.
This misprision surrounding Su Lin’s sex is revealing. It’s tempting to speculate that Ruth Harkness didn’t just bring the first living panda to the West, but also did much to influence how the animal would be received and perceived thereafter. Until then, the kind of big-game hunters who had gone after pandas had seen it as a sort of macho quest, and had therefore been inclined to emphasise the panda’s attributes as a big, strong, potentially dangerous wild beast. Yet press photographs of Ruth Harkness with Su Lin strike a notably feminine tone: the American woman is shown bottle-feeding the cub – like a loving, nurturing mother figure, sentimentally portrayed – or else they are seen posing together side by side, the picture of elegance and glamour, like two fur-coated socialites.
Kermit Roosevelt was among Su Lin’s first visitors at Brookfield Zoo, but the guest list also included such celebrated actresses as Helen Hayes and the child star Shirley Temple.
The arrival of Su Lin in the United States therefore marked the end of the panda’s image as a kind of slavering monster, with Ruth Harkness helping to brand it in the popular consciousness as a quintessentially cuddly and cute creature.
The Roosevelt brothers had striven to invest the panda with a masculine mystique; Ruth Harkness gave it a more feminine allure.
DRIVEN TO THE MARGINS
For all their macho posturing, the big-game hunters were few in number, and were therefore never too much of a threat to the survival of the panda as a species. For only a tiny elite could afford the time and expense of an adventurous hunting trip, which was largely what gave panda-hunting its glamour. Moreover, what was already a remote part of the world – from the Western point of view – was rendered that much more inaccessible as China spiralled into civil conflict and war with Japan later during the twentieth century.
The real menace to the panda continued to be (as, indeed, it had been for centuries) its gradual displacement from what had been its home territories as the area of human settlement continued to expand. Today, we think of the panda as being an animal of the mountains, but fossil evidence shows that it once lived in lowland areas, too. The panda can, in fact, be at home anywhere where there are trees to rest in and bamboo to eat, which, at one time, would have been much of central China.
Ruth Harkness did so much to frame perceptions of the panda as a pet – and even as a fashionable accessory – that it became easy to forget about its natural existence in the wild.
Lurking as it does in thick undergrowth, the giant panda can be maddeningly hard to find. Many of its would-be hunters therefore went home empty-handed.
An increasing human population has led to settlements expanding from the valleys into the foothills, and a reduction in suitable habitat for pandas.
POPULATION PRESSURES
China went through enormous changes during what we in the West call the early modern period. Having remained relatively stable for a thousand years (at between 60 and 100 million), the country’s population then rose extraordinarily steeply. In power from the end of the fourteenth century, the Ming Dynasty established relative stability and peace within the country, like its successor, the Qing Dynasty, also pushing back its boundaries by a successful policy of military expansion. While China’s land area grew, its population was also increasing in leaps and bounds: by 1800, it was approaching the 400 million mark, and was climbing fast.
That such growth could be sustained is testimony to the industry and skill with which the Chinese worked their land. Higher-yielding strains of rice were developed; the use of natural fertilisers was perfected; tools were refined; and techniques of irrigation were introduced, as were previously unfamiliar crops, many (like maize, groundnuts and yams) brought from the New World. New lands were brought under cultivation, too, by expansion from valley floors to surrounding hillsides. Forests were felled, bamboo thickets were cleared, and farmers learned how to construct terraces so that hitherto uncultivable slopes could be put into agricultural production.
Even now, China was struggling to feed its expanding population, prompting streams of migrants to set out for what had thus far been largely unsettled frontier regions. Beginning in the valleys, vast tracts of trees and bamboo were cleared here, too. Industrial development during the second half of the twentieth century only increased the pressure.
An economic miracle spelled an ecological disaster, for as the human population soared, so that of the giant panda steadily declined. By the middle of the twentieth century, Ailuropoda melanoleuca had become an endangered species, and experts believed that there could only be a few hundred left – maybe just over a thousand at most.
Fossil finds tell the story of the panda’s slow, but relentless, retreat from its home territories from the Pleistocene epoch to the present day. We’re wrong to think of the panda as being ‘naturally’ an animal of the uplands.
Once more widespread, giant pandas are now largely restricted by human activity, mountains and earthquakes to patches of montane forest between 1,500 and 3,000m above sea level.
As China’s population grew over the centuries, so its area of settlement steadily expanded and vast areas of forest were cleared. Today, the Chinese wilderness is beautiful, but sparse.
Being primarily solitary, the fragmentation of suitable habitat by human activity is a serious threat to pandas finding a mate.
A watchful panda keeps a lookout from a lofty perch. The past twenty centuries or so have seen human settlement advancing inexorably upon surviving panda strongholds.
The Chinese government began protecting areas of panda habitat from the 1940s, and since the 1960s has established many reserves.
A 1938 poster for Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, the first Western zoo to show a giant panda.