Zoo pushes final offer to keep pandas

By Howard Pousner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It appears that Zoo Atlanta’s $500,000 fund-raising campaign to keep the giant pandas in Atlanta will come up short. But if you can’t bear the thought of the superstar bears going back to China, not to worry.

The zoo has raised $260,000 in its Give So They Stay drive, which launched in mid-June and was supposed to wrap up by the end of this month. While a final decision won’t come until Tuesday’s quarterly board meeting, president and CEO Dennis Kelly is predicting that the pandas will not be packing their bags.

The Grant Park attraction is making a final push with a special membership offer — $99 for two adults and up to four children (who don’t have to live in the same household) — from which proceeds will be plowed into the drive.

“We think it will add significantly to our total,” Kelly said. “It probably won’t put us over the top, but I think we’re close enough that the board has confidence in us and that we’ll go ahead and ... declare victory and keep the pandas.”

In truth, the deck was stacked strongly in the pandas’ favor from the start. Seeking to raise $2.5 million to extend the animals’ stay five years, a deal similar to one that San Diego Zoo had just inked with the Chinese government, Atlanta officials had already identified $2 million when it launched the public Give So They Stay campaign.

More than $1 million of that came from anonymous corporate and individual donors. The remainder was from cuts in panda expenses, including trimming an insurance policy, a move that Chinese officials were on board with. None of it impacted animal care or welfare, Kelly said. “Just doing things smarter, better.”

With $2 million banked before going public in pursuit of the final $500,000, zoo officials never sounded anything other than confident of success, even as giving proceeded slowly.

“This is certainly a tough time for everybody, which in some respects makes us even more encouraged that we raised more than a quarter-million dollars” in individual donations, Kelly said.

The $2.5 million loan — $500,000 per year for five years — would cost Zoo Atlanta half the $1 million yearly fee it’s paid for a decade. The new deal is now working its way through Chinese government and Zoo Atlanta board approval.

While parents Lun Lun and Yang Yang, both 12, and boy cub Xi Lan, 1, would remain in Atlanta, the zoo announced at the beginning of the Give So They Stay drive that Mei Lan (translation: “Atlanta Beauty”), 3, would depart for China early in the new year. The Chinese believe her good genes make her a beautiful candidate for motherhood.

“I like to kid and say that all the boy pandas in China are very anxious to meet her,” Kelly said.

Mei Lan is expected to journey in early to mid-February to her new home at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in southwest China, but not before a series of send-off celebrations.

And Kelly believes her departure should be celebrated, reflecting the success of giant panda conservation efforts at four American zoos (including San Diego, the National Zoo in Washington and the Memphis Zoo) and zoos worldwide, as well as at Chinese reserves.

“We took a species that was in rapid decline 20 years ago, with very little breeding, with infant mortality running high and a lot of land loss going on in the wild, and turned that around,” he said. Captive panda numbers are now up to nearly 270, and there are an estimated 1,600 pandas in the Chinese wild.

Back in Atlanta, Mei Lan’s departure will set in motion a series of changes. Kid brother Xi Lan will be weaned from Lun Lun early next year and moved to his own enclosure. Next will come breeding season and a hoped-for third Lun Lun-Yang Yang offspring.