Moral guardians concerned about the state of Thai culture can be further alarmed by reports that Chiang Mai Zoo (what is it with those northerners?!) “which has hosted a couple of pandas for four years, will play porn videos for the male next month to encourage them to breed in captivity.” The Sydney Morning Herald report (have any Thai outlets picked up this story?) continues:
The pair - living chastely together at the zoo in the northern city of Chiang Mai since arriving from China in 2003 - would be separated in December, but stay close enough for occasional glimpses of each other, said panda project chief Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee. “They don’t know how to mate so we need to show the male how, through videos,” Prasertsak told Reuters on Saturday. He said Chuang Chuang, the six-year-old male, would be shown the videos on a large screen when he might be feeling amorous. “We’ll play the video at the most comfortable and intimate time for him, perhaps after dinner,” Prasertsak said, hoping Chuang Chuang would then use the techniques on Lin Hui, a five-year-old female. The zoo is hosting a four-day international panda conference that starts on Monday, drawing 200 wildlife and panda specialists from around the world.
3 responses so far ↓
1 New Mandala » Pandas say no! // Apr 2, 2007 at 9:09 pm
[...] by refusing to cooperate with the new regime. In an important update on an earlier New Mandala story, the Bangkok Post reports: Thailand’s Chiang Mai Zoo on Monday resorted to artificially [...]
2 New Mandala » Koala bears offspring in Chiang Mai // Apr 18, 2007 at 12:35 am
[...] at New Mandala we have been following the Chiang Mai panda’s efforts to reproduce with considerable interest. But now, in much more exciting news, The Nation reports: [...]
3 Leif Jonsson // Mar 28, 2008 at 8:13 am
From The Nation, Nov 9, 2005, a year before your Panda Porn Post: “Hundreds turned out to celebrate the wedding of two giant pandas at [Chiangmai] Zoo Wednesday. Officials are planning to have the two pandas … start mating. But the zoo wanted them to be married first. To celebrate the day, two mascots dressed as pandas and took the vows on behalf of the bears”. One wonders if the same hundreds of people turned up to watch the porn, too. But this public morality, of having the animals married, is interesting in itself. Contemporary identity work is deeply entangled with the dynamics of official recognition. One example from beyond the zoo, from a lowland peasant area of Chiangmai Province in northern Thailand concerns the revival of a blessing ceremony aimed at securing village prosperity, where a male and a female buffalo are married. As it was reported in a national newspaper in early June, 2004, the ceremony “was one of the village’s long-standing traditional events before it faded away for a long time, only to be revived about four years ago.” The revived event was to be “presided over by the sheriff and a provincial-livestock official [and] the marriage will also be registered” (The Nation, June 9, 2004). That is, even explicitly local and un-modern practices involve agents of the state and seek state-legitimation through registration. Maybe the zoo can rely on the nearest OBoTo office to sponsor weddings as the preservation of culture.
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