Panda expert Dr Sarah Bexell has said the
international breeding programme to save giant pandas has failed
Sunday 17 April 2016
A panda expert has said the captive breeding
programme designed to save pandas should be scrapped because it is "giving
humanity false hope".
Dr Sarah Bexell, director of conservation education
at the Chengdu Research Base, admitted in a frank documentary that the
international effort to save the monochrome bears has not delivered the
expected results.
Starting in 1987 with six pandas they rescued from
the wild, the programme has since produced 400 offspring bred in
captivity.
But only five have been introduced back into
the world, of which only three have survived.
In the BBC Horizon documentary "Should We
Close Our Zoos?", Dr Bexell says: “We’ve learned a lot, filled volumes of
journals and textbooks but we have not made significant headway in terms of
conservation.
“So I guess right now we would almost have to say
it has been quite a failure and even though many of these projects even were
considered successful for short periods of time, they’ve lost ground.
“Should we continue them? Right now I’m feeling no
because I’m really worried that it’s sending the wrong message to humanity.
It’s giving humanity false hope.”
She blamed the world’s ever-increasing population
and consumerism for the steady decline in panda numbers.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!