Clinging on: the panda's numbers are dwindling

   Viagra to give pandas
   a longer lease of love 

         FROM OLIVER AUGUST IN BEIJING
  CHINESE pandas are to be given Viagra to improve
  their sex drive and save the species from
  extinction. Scientists are said to be experimenting
  with the impotence drug after traditional Chinese
  herbal medicine failed to lift the animals' libido. 

  Poachers and environmental changes have reduced
  the worldwide panda population to about 1,000 and
  the notoriously coy animals have frustrated the
  efforts of zoo-keepers to reverse the decline,
  turning their backs both on their intended mates and
  the world's press photographers. 

  The Beijing Youth Daily said: "The male panda can
  only mate for ten to 20 seconds at a time, and
  hence the chances of getting the female pregnant
  are very low. With Viagra, the male could mate for
  up to 20 minutes." 

  Viagra is a last resort after other attempts to
  increase the panda's reproduction rate yielded poor
  results. Most pandas live in heavily guarded parks
  in China, where poaching is supposed to be
  impossible and environmental conditions are said
  to be ideal. However, even there some reservations
  have had to resort to a form of dating agency to
  find their male pandas suitably inspiring partners. 

  Zhang Hemin, director of a panda centre in the
  province of Sichuan, wondered whether Viagra
  would do the trick. He said that earlier attempts at
  using drugs to rouse the pandas had backfired. "We
  tried to give them Chinese medicine in the
  mid-1990s. As a result, the sex drive of the pandas
  did improve but they also became hot-tempered and
  attacked the females. That obviously wasn't so good
  and we had to end the experiment." 

  Mr Zhang said: "The real problem is that many
  pandas don't know how to mate." 

  Their love lives had to be improved by making their
  environment more natural, letting them watch
  television, and teaching them simple tasks with sex
  as a reward, he said. 

  Scientists have recently tried to clone panda
  embryos and then insert them into a living panda's
  womb. The first panda embryo created in this way
  was bred at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It
  was named Dolly, after the sheep cloned in Britain
  two years ago. Chinese scientists injected cells
  from a dead panda into the egg of a Japanese white
  rabbit. The egg has grown into an embryo over the
  past year and is now ready to be implanted in the
  womb of a female panda.