There’s no doubt that pandas are loveable. They’re the blueprint for an adorable animal: fluffy, chubby, and quirky. Still, the natural world is far more gruesome than we may think. I recently came across a video circulating on social media that shows a mother panda ‘abandoning’ her child for food. The clip raises a question many viewers ask after seeing it (just read the comments): do pandas abandon their cubs, or is something else happening behind the scenes?
The handler distracts the panda with honey water, and as she reaches for it, her child is taken away and replaced with its twin, with little protest from her. That’s quite a contrast to everything we humans know and appreciate about motherhood. For one, motherhood in humans is almost synonymous with sacrifice. This led me to dig into what’s actually happening in the video, and so I found some interesting details. Here’s what I learned.
Firstly, Panda Moms Love Their Children
Source: wikimediaDespite what the video may make it seem like, panda moms are actually pretty dedicated. Given how clumsy and seemingly nonchalant they are, this was initially hard for me to believe. So I looked up some information and found that panda mothers cuddle their babies as soon as they are born, feed them milk, and never let them out of sight.
To be transparent with you, I haven’t studied zoology and wasn’t familiar with all the jargon in the study I came across, but what I understood is that the study estimated that panda mothers spend up to 80% of their time holding their young. In the wild, panda mothers even lose a significant amount of weight while dedicating themselves wholly to motherhood, even going months without food. The baby panda is usually fully weaned at 8 to 9 months. They only go their separate ways when the mother is expecting again, usually when the baby panda reaches 18 months of age.
This makes sense when you consider how helpless baby pandas are at birth. They are tiny, weigh 3 ounces, and are absolutely incapable of surviving without their mother. As a matter of fact, they can’t even hold themselves up without their mothers clutching them to the chest at feeding time.
So, What’s Actually Happening in the Video?
It’s common for mother pandas to give birth to twins; in fact, almost half of panda births result in twins. This isn’t always good news.
Pandas have limited resources to care for their offspring, including milk and energy. They have evolved to survive on a diet of bamboo, which is hard to digest and very low in nutrients. This isn’t an issue under normal circumstances, since they barely move and snack all the time. But child rearing requires serious dedication, and pandas stop feeding altogether while caring for their young.
Given the work involved in ensuring their offspring survive, pandas are forced to abandon one child to fully dedicate themselves to the other, thereby increasing their chances of survival. It would be nearly impossible for them to take care of both at the same time.
The IUCN Red List considers giant pandas as vulnerable. Thus, in such cases, conservation efforts focus on making sure that both panda babies thrive into adulthood, and successfully so.
The way they do this is by distracting the panda mother with a treat, such as honey water, and then replacing the baby, essentially tricking the panda mother into thinking it has only one cub. While the mother panda is tempted, the process nonetheless takes great patience and trust. Conservation teams replace the babies up to 10 times each day. While one cub is with the mother, the other is kept in an incubator and fed formula milk.
This is exactly what’s taking place in the video, shot at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
So Does This Make Pandas Bad Moms?
Source: wikimediaPandas are not bad moms for abandoning their child, though it is bad for them, PR-wise. In the wild, plenty of animals are forced to make the difficult decision of abandoning a child to increase the odds of survival for the rest of their children.
A recent cat rescue case comes to mind. A cat gave birth to 5 kittens, one of which was the runt of the litter, visibly smaller and with a lower chance of survival. The mother visibly started neglecting the weaker child to focus her energies on the others.
There’s also a famous heartbreaking footage of a lioness abandoning her paralyzed newborn, because she knew there was simply no way it could survive in the wild. Additionally, it’s incredibly common for animals to eat a deformed or dying infant. This may sound cruel, but a near-death offspring could make for an important source of protein for a nursing mother, who could then use them to ensure the survival of her other offspring. Humans, far removed from the cruel realities of the wild, find this difficult to conceive, but it is actually very difficult to be an animal mother.