Customer Reviews

The Last Panda

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In this book, George Schaller depicts the giant panda of China not only as a "cute" and lovable creature, but that it is also in a struggle to overcome extinction. I enjoyed reading this book because George Schaller writes down his most inner thoughts and feelings regarding the panda project in China. He does not hold anything back from the reader. From reading this book, I learned about the plight of the panda that other books have failed to mention.

In 1962 I started to feed Chou En Lai's people with much needed material and tools from donators here in the USA and many other places on Earth when Chou said to me that fewer than 20 could be found. The author of this book vaguely chooses a much later date and panda number. Even using the vague numbers of the author I see the panda numbers as having increased over 2000%- and that is not looking all over for the pandas as done 50 years ago. As I said in the title of this review the key to the misleading choice of the basis for the change in panda numbers is when and who does the counting. Environmentalists are a poor choice to believe compared to those that actually work with the pandas.

Two years ago I went to the "Panda Breeding Centre" near Chengdu in China.
Since I've seen those lovely animals, I do want to know and read more about them. That's why I did buy this nice book.

Despite his universal appeal, the panda is an insult to both good design and truth in advertising. Is he a black bear with white patches, an aberrant raccoon or something unique?
Whatever, he isn't a as cuddly and friendly as he looks.
And considering that he has an inefficient digestive system melded to a diet of unnourishing bamboo, it's rather a surprise that he has beaten the evolution game thus far. (And he doesn't even chew the bamboo thoroughly.)
He isn't likely to keep beating the odds, according to George Schaller, one of our best-known literary zoologists.
Schaller spent some time with the World Wildlife Fund in the early '80s trying to set up a joint Chinese-international research program into the mysterious panda. They learned a lot, duly reported in specialist publications.
Only a decade later did Schaller get around to writing a popular account of his panda experience, similar to his earlier books about tigers, lions etc. Yet not so similar, either.
While Schaller has always been interested in preservation of large mammals, "The Last Panda" is more alarmist and packs more of an emotional wallop.
That is, once you get past (or skip) the first 50 pages, which recount his tiresome interactions with the sclerotic Chinese bureaucracy. This is neither new nor interesting nor surprising, though it is of vast importance, whether you are a panda or a peasant.
But especially if you are a panda.
Schaller always writes with both grace and precision, and here also with passion and frustration. "Too often treatises on endangered species seem to be mere memorials," he writes, though he went into the project determined to have an impact on the beast's future.
Ten years later, it looked as if Schaller was just one more foreigner ground down by China, which its own people exceeding fine, too. "I was prepared to fight on their behalf, to rage and scream if necessary," he writes.
But "there's a limit to the art of endurance."
Non-Chinese also come in for criticism, especially at zoos that "rent" pandas.
The Chinese have never given the pandas an even break, but as long as both species were primitive and backward it was a standoff. Modernity, which the Chinese have adopted except in the fields of law and ethics, has given them the upper hand over the pandas.
But not only in China. There is a school of thought now which says large land mammals cannot co-exist with humans at the densities humans are achieving for themselves. That may be proven wrong, but it looks as if it can't happen soon enough for the pandas.
Though it has its lovely moments, "The Last Panda" is a sad book.
A year after the hardcover edition was published in 1993, Schaller issued a paperback, which included a relatively upbeat new afterword. The Chinese government, he reported, had improved its panda policies, with regular successes in the captive breeding program.
Ten years before, Schaller had been very pessimistic about Chinese suspiciousness of outside ideas, "but I have found that they always consider and, when possible, assimilate these ideas, especially if pragmatic suggestions conform to their concept of moral rightness."
Unfortunately, the American zoo bureaucrats who come in for Schaller's wrath for their fabulously lucrative rented panda exhibits had not also advanced toward enlightenment over the preceding decade.
The San Diego Zoo, despite its fancy reputation, even regressed to the point of demanding wild-caught, rather than cage-reared, animals for its multimillion-dollar exhibit.
That exhibit was stymied by Clinton administration officials, but with the Old Testament view of animals that many congressmen carry with them, the outlook for exploitable species was growing grimmer in the mid-1990s.
Current news suggests the Chinese are now treating their pandas better than their own children. It is hard to view this as progress.

This book left me with a feeling one has after seeing a very moving film--sad, but reflective and motivated. I'll think about this book and any global conservation partnership differently now. The Last Panda gives equal time to the ecology and lives of wild pandas, but also to the difficulties of forging an international conservation project between Western and Eastern cultures, in this case the WWF and the Chinese government. Bureacratic apathy, even malfeasance, differing ideas of what constitutes "research" and even sad grasps at publicity using pandas as pawns disrupt and ultimately damage the precious few pandas in the study. Schaller's droll voice lends a small bit of humor to what must have been an extreme challenge in self-control when dealing with the friction between involved parties. This is not an uplifting success story, but almost rather a story of candid warning of the realities of forging global partnerships in any realm. Ultimately, concerned citizens, researchers, NGOs and governments have to remember why we're all involved: not for personal glory or public relations, but to save the endangered animal.

It's now known -- after a comprehensive Chinese-U.S. panda census carried out between 2001 and 2003/2004 -- that there are over 1,600 giant pandas left in the wild. The previous, oft-quoted estimate of "fewer than 1,000" was way too low. The benefit of hindsight on the part of a recent reader of this book, by naturalist George Schaller, makes this book less than believable. Schaller spends much time criticizing the Chinese government as well as Western governments for what he perceives to be ignorance and apathy toward the "plight" of the giant panda. But, one must ask, if he had indeed spent more time researching pandas instead of writing numerous books -- seriously, no matter how smart you are, the amount of waking hours, and working hours, you have are always limited, not to mention the amount of time one must expend in order to travel to the remote areas Schaller has -- Schaller should have known, or found out, that 1) there were more pandas out there in the wild, and 2) several Chinese research institutions, including Wolong Nature Reserve, had already made ground-breaking discoveries in captive breeding by the time this paranoid book was published.

Granted, Schaller seems to have felt a great deal for the giant panda. I don't doubt his sincerety. But by bluntly criticizing others -- and forgetting that conservation takes a lot of money, money to protect the animals, money to research into the animals, and money to help locals escape poverty without resorting to poaching and logging -- he trivializes the amount of effort needed to preserve the panda or any other endangered species. His blindness to what officials in China and in the West, including those at the WWF (where he now works), had already been doing is simply disheartening and misinforming.