Over at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog, they have a nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker that details The Complicated Legacy Of A Panda Who Was Really Good At Sex.
It's a good piece (read the whole thing), but it misses an interesting part of the story. You see, in her rush to make one particular panda by the name of Pan Pan the "savior of his species," Ms. Koerth-Baker missed the equally important contribution of porn.
Yes porn of the panda kind, which is to say sexy video tapes of pandas going at it in flagrente.
Back in 2007 I detailed what was going on in a post entitled Group Sex and Porn, in which I noted that there are several species that seem to rely on orgies for procreation, but that pandas seemed to be getting by on a new regime based on Viagra and porn.
The Telegraph caught up to that story in 2010 in an article entitled Viagra and Porn Used to Tempt Pandas to Breed:
Panda Makers, a BBC Two documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough, reveals how the Chengdu Research Base is attempting to breed a stable population of 300 bears in captivity and then set them free.
Just 50 years ago, it was thought to be impossible to breed a panda in captivity, but since then pioneering methods have yielded some success.
It is an uphill struggle, though: female pandas are in heat for less than 72 hours a year, and even the use of the drug Viagra and “panda porn” – videos of other pandas mating – doesn’t always achieve the desired effect. The documentary, which airs this evening at 8.00 pm, follows a futile attempt to persuade a male and young female to mate: subsequently, vets performed an artificial insemination.
Sir David described the Chinese centre – the most costly panda conservation effort ever mounted – as “a man-made solution to a man-made problem, an insurance policy against extinction.”
Today Panda Porn is mainstream and there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to it.
Pandas are not alone in the world of porn and speed dating.
I once visited a horse farm in New Jersey that was shaped like a cross with an enormous skylight atrium at the center. It seemed like an incredibly elaborate barn to me, but I was informed that they bred racing horses there and that to "collect" from the stallions they put a "jump mare" at the center where it was mounted by the boys and an artificial vagina of some sort was used to collect the semen.
The first stallion was always the hard one, but after that it was easy to collect, as all the other stallions would have been hanging their heads out the stall door to take in "the show" going on under the skylight.
"It's like 16-year old boys at a strip club" my hostess explained to me. "It doesn't take much."
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