Note to the BBC: Give the people giant panda porn!
I find it interesting that the article is accompanied by two stills that appear to be from the panda sex video. One is a boring photo of the two pandas looking at each other from across a room. The other is of Qing Qing attacking Ha Lei, accompanied by the caption “Females commonly attack males after mating”.
These are strange choices for photos to accompany the article. The article is specifically about researchers showing this video to uninterested pandas in an effort to get them aroused. It should have been accompanied by photos of the researchers showing the video to pandas, a still of the pandas mating in the video, and (since the BBC obviously has the video of the pandas mating) they also should have posted the video to their website as a companion piece to the article. But that’s apparently not the way Western culture works. Violent photos are just fine, but photos of pandas actually engaged in mating (the horror) cannot be shown, and video –forget it.
Giant pandas mate rarely in captivity, and there are only a couple thousand of them left in the world. The entire video is newsworthy by any definition of the term. Who could be offended at a pair of pandas going at it?
