(CNN) — Animal handlers in China have developed a “sexercise” program to try to encourage extinction-threatened pandas to overcome their notoriously low sex drives.
Featuring hip and pelvic-strengthening “dances” for male pandas, the program also sees inexperienced pandas watching their older relatives make love to learn a few moves.
The handlers hope to encourage mating among the sex-shy-but-endangered animals, the Chinese state media reported Tuesday. They work at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in the southwestern Sichuan province, the China Daily said.
Keepers teach male pandas a dance-like routine to strengthen the pelvic and hip area — it also boosts the animal’s stamina, the paper said.
In the wild, pandas are solitary animals, coming together only in the spring to mate.
Keepers place a male panda in a female’s den when she’s not there and vice versa. This allows them to smell each other’s odors. And if the pandas get randy at the same time, keepers bring them together, the report said.
“We arrange love-making between two excellent pandas in front of inexperienced pandas, which have never had sex. It does work,” the reserve’s deputy chief, Fei Lisong, told the newspaper.
The unusual measures are aimed at increasing the population of captive giant pandas. They have famously low sexual desires — and that threatens their future.
Fewer than 1,600 giant pandas survive in the wild, along the edge of the Tibetan plateau in China, according to the .
Finally some good news from China. We need that, my friends, we really do.
While we work hard to make the Chinese Government see sense, let’s also celebrate that which is GOOD about China – if it had not been for the dedicated work by Chinese panda handlers and animal preservists, there would be no Great Pandas left in the world. Much is BAD in China, but this is GOOD. Please keep that in mind.
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