June 9, 2014 • 37 mins
In the 1930s a New York socialite had a dream. She wanted to be the first person to capture a panda from Asia and return to the western world with it. Her quest had a significant impact on the way the Western world viewed wild animals. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from stock
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
I'm Tracy Wilson, and uh, this is actually a topic
that I've had on my which lift almost at the
beginning of when we came on. I know I've said,
(00:23):
I said, I'd think in the last couple of weeks
that I have been trying to go back to some
of those original ones I was really excited about and
work um in. But this is one that I really
wrestled with because the material is a little bit emotionally
difficult for me for like sort of silly, crazy animal
lady reasons. It's the story of one of those odd
ambitions that only uh, the privileged are really afforded. But
(00:47):
in the nineteen thirties and New York socialite had this dream, uh,
and that dream was to be the first person to
capture a panda from Asia and returned to the Western
world with it. And it's a as I said, it's
something I wrestle with a little bit. Um. I've been
very open that I am an animal person and I
struggle with the concept of animals and captivity. And I'm
sure many of our listeners have similar feelings. I see
(01:09):
both sides of the issue. I volunteered with zoos and
aquariums before, and I really love it. Um. You know,
captive animals in accredited facilities increased public awareness and they
provide a situation where the animals can be studied, they
can bolster conservation efforts. But you know, there's part of
me that has to acknowledge that that is not the
natural state for those animals. So, as I said, I
(01:31):
struggle with it. Probably other people do too. And this
is an important kind of uh touchstone in the development
of animals and captivity in the United States. UH. And so,
for example, the first time a Westerner even saw a panda,
it was not alive. It was a pelpone display in
a private home. And that was back in eighteen sixty nine.
And once UH, Europe and the US kind of got
(01:54):
ahold of this knowledge, it sort of fed into a
time when exploring other lands and kind of a little
bit of a conquering mentality was going on, and particularly
in the realm of animals, there was a lot of
We're discovering new animals all the time. Well, there was
also a strain of orientalism at the time, and because
panda's are native to China, that definitely fed the fire
(02:15):
of it. Uh, and it really ended up kicking off
an obsession in the Western world with finding these black
and white bears that seemed so exotic. And in the
early half of the twentieth century, one woman who we
will talk about today, this person I spoke of at
the very beginning, really catapulted the giant panda onto the
world stage and she made the species of media darling
(02:36):
to some degree. So we're going to talk about Ruth Harkness.
So Ruth Macombs Harkness was not born into money, she
married into it. She actually came from pretty humble origins.
Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a seamstress,
and they made their home in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She was
born on September twenty one and she had three siblings.
(02:59):
The conservative atmosphere of the home life of the Macombs
was not really something that Ruth was comfortable with. She
had a little bit of edge to her. She knew
there was more in the world that she wanted to discover. Uh.
She became an avid reader as a consequence, and UH,
the entry in her senior yearbook under her mature kind
of is a great encapsulation of what she was like
(03:21):
at this time, and it says, quote, Ruth is rather
hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her,
you find that she has many good qualities and is
a friend worth having. I started the look it sounds
like something Mary Poppins would say about someone who is difficult.
I just really really loved that. Ruth tried out college
at the University of Colorado, but she only lasted a
(03:42):
semester before heading to Cuba briefly to work as an
English teacher, but that really did not suit her either.
She had a little bit of wanderlust, uh, and she
was hitting her twenties, of course, just as the jazz
age was kicking off, and so Ruth moved to New York,
allegedly I think, with like twenty five bucks to her name,
and she got a job there as a dress designer,
and she was basically kind of designing uh outfits that
(04:05):
kind of were knockoffs of what was going on in
Paris at the time, and she very quickly and very
fully embraced the decadent aspects of flapper lifestyle. She really
became a quintessential party girl. She was a heavy drinker.
She was a heavy smoker, and she had this personality
though that was really perfectly suited to social life and
kind of becoming a social darling. Her friends described her
(04:27):
as very smart and very witty, and she had a
very commanding presence. She was just sort of bubbly and
outspoken and kind of the perfect It was a perfect
time for a girl like her to really make her
way in the city. During this time, Ruth met William
Harvest Harkness, Jr. And he was wealthy and had a
Harvard education. Bill's father was a high powered attorney, and
(04:50):
the young man was a regular in the society pages.
The two of them were really drawn together and kind
of an opposite attract scenario. Yeah, Bill was much quieter
and more reserve, uh, But he was also really well
traveled and he spoke many languages, which really appealed to Ruth.
And what really bonded them as a couple is that
(05:10):
they both loved reading, and they would read together in
trade books and discuss the things that they had read
in the books. And they also spent a great deal
of time just pouring over maps and travel journals and
kind of plotting these grand adventures that they really hoped
to take together one day. And this was not like
the fantasy kind of planning of like one day we'll
run away and spend three months in Paris. Like they
(05:32):
were really planning some trips. Uh. And they ended up
dating for quite some time before they finally married, although
uh some accounts say they basically were living as married people,
like they just didn't make it all official in paperworky
for a while. So, with the financial backing of his
family money, Bill Harkness made an adventurer slash explorer his occupation,
(05:54):
which is awesome work if you can get it, if
you could make it for yourself. Right. So this was
a time when new animals are being discovered all the time,
and men like Bill would race to be the first
to capture and sometimes kill one of them. Yeah, it
was a you know kind of that that sense of
adventure we've talked about before. It was what fed a
(06:15):
lot of like the Everest expeditions, but like being the
first to do the thing, to see this animal, to
capture this animal. There was a lot of like a
claim that went with that. And Bill had just had
a successful expedition to capture a Komodo dragon, which I
would love to do more research on that trip specifically,
because those things are poisonous and me and not delightful.
(06:38):
They do not want hugs. But he, you know, it
was sort of chuffed with his success from me, and
he decided that he was going to be the first
man to capture a giant panda. And this was in
four when he kind of mounted this plan, and so
he made a trip to China, but he got a
little blockaded. He ended up spending the next year or
(07:00):
there in China just waiting for the proper permit paperwork
to all be approved, because it was not an easy
thing to just stroll in and put your team together
and go. But unfortunately, before his expedition could actually get
underway and all of that paper work could happen, Bill
became very ill, uh and he was treated for a while,
but he ended up dying on February eighteenth of nineteen
(07:21):
thirty six in Shanghai, and his illness, which was not
initially accurately diagnosed, turned out to be throat cancer. So
he had basically been withering away while he waited for
these documents. Although his missives back to Ruth were all
very peppy and upbeat. So when Bill died, Ruth inherited
his money, and she also inherited the expedition equipment that
(07:44):
he had already assembled in China. So, in a move
that completely shocked all of her socialite friends, Ruth, Ruth
decided that instead of settling into life as a wealthy widow,
she would travel to China and pick up where Bill
left off. Yeah, this was really, uh a wild move.
I mean she was basically saying, all that money and
(08:05):
I inherit it, I'm not going to live off of it.
I'm going to spend it all to go to China
and do what my husband was trying to do. Uh.
And you know, this certainly seems like a crazy move
for a woman who fully embraced creature comforts. I mean,
she was very open that she like sort of living
her spoiled life in New York and like she wouldn't
walk a block if she could take a cab and uh,
(08:26):
so it seemed very surprising too many people for her
to just go, no, I'm gonna go do that trip
my husband was on. But really what motivated her was
likely just a very deep grief because as we said
it wasn't opposite attract scenario. And Ruth and Bill at
this point had been together for a decade and they
were very happily married and very close partners. They were
(08:46):
basically best friends. But before we get to Ruth traveling
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dot com and enter stuff. So back to Ruth's adventures.
Most of what we knew about Ruth's first journey is
through her letters to her best friend, Hazel Perkins, who
was nicknamed Perky, and so once Ruth arrived in Shanghai,
she really took a different approach to the mission than
was customary and certainly different than the way Bill had
(10:38):
handled things. Whereas normally Western explorers would go into a
new place like this on these adventure and discovery expeditions
with a team of fellow Westerners and they would lay
out their plan and follow it. Ruth got rid of
all of the men that he had already hired and
brought on, and she opted to seek out locals as
her guides and her employees, at least almost locals. She
(11:01):
ended up hiring Quentin Young, and he was a young
Chinese American college student as her god. She said of him,
when Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition,
the obstacles that he had surrounded me began to disappear.
In fact, the Chinese wall of it can't be done,
crumpled like the walls of Jericho. Yeah, this was not
(11:21):
the Young family's first time assisting Americans with panda expeditions.
Quentin's younger brother, Jack had actually led Teddy Roosevelt's sons
on a giant panda hunting expedition in nine and in
this case, the goal which was achieved was strictly to
hunt the animal. With Jack's assistance, the Roosevelt boys shot
(11:42):
and killed a giant panda and returned home with it
as a hunting trophy, giving them the dubious honor of
being the first Americans to kill a panda. Quinton knew
the areas of Tibet where their travels were going to
take them, and his guidance in this expedition really can't
be understated. He was fluent in Chinese as well as English,
and he was able to handle virtually every logistical need
(12:04):
of Mrs harkness ambitious plan. Yeah. I mean, this is
a woman who she uh you know, was used to
getting everything she wanted, and he kind of made that
happen for her again. In China, Uh and Harkness and
Young left Shanghai on September twenty six and nineteen thirty six,
and they traveled up the Yancey River for several weeks
before reaching cheng Do, which is the capital of Sichuan Province,
(12:27):
and there they hired a complement of servants to carry loads,
and they also hired a cook before they started their
journey into the Tibetan highlands. What they wanted to do
was to capture a baby panda. Harkness carried a supply
of items that she thought would help her care for
a baby panda, so she had nursing bottles and dry milk.
Through her letters to Perkey, she mentioned that no one
(12:50):
really knew how to care for a panda, but she
seemed enthusiastic and confident about her plan, and her idea
to acquire an infant was actually another departure for the
usual approach. Previous expeditions to capture a panda uh and
ones that were you know, being mounted around the same
time always intended to bring back an adult. But that
was really quite problematic for a number of reasons. Uh. First,
(13:14):
no matter how cute pandas are, uh, they are wild bears.
They do not want to be disturbed. They do not
want your hugs anymore than the komodo dragons do. Uh.
The equipment for the capture would also be extremely cumbersome,
so they would have to have porters to carry chains
like heavy chains and traps and cages for an adult animal.
And additionally, just transporting an adult would also mean that
(13:35):
you had to deal with an adult panda's appetite, which
would have included carrying a great deal of bamboo back
along with it. Just to sustain it through the journey.
Trying to get a cub instead solved most of these problems. Yeah,
smaller package, less fuss with not so much bamboot boardage. No,
not at all. Uh So the team traveled up to
(13:56):
thirty miles a day on foot, and sometimes the temperatures
got incredibly high, uh, north of a hundred degrees fahrenheit.
And you would think that, uh, someone who had been
living in privilege for so long would really struggle with it,
but surprisingly Ruth apparently did extremely well on the journey.
She was just driven and she you know, hoofed it
all those miles. And sometimes when she would get tired,
(14:17):
the porters would kind of make a hammock style chair
for her that she could rest in for a little
while and they would carry her for a bit. But
mostly she did it under her own steerage there um,
so she really you know, kind of stepped up to
the bar. And also during this journey, at some point
Harkness and her guide Quentin Young became romantically involved. This
(14:39):
group was eventually met by an elderly Tibetan man. He
was named Loud Saying, and he said that the word
had reached him that a Western woman was looking for
a panda. He said he knew where to find them,
and he offered his services, so he and his son
in law joined the group as they headed into the
bamboo forest. Yeah, when she I read an article on
(14:59):
a link in show notes, and it's kind of her
relaying her story. It's much briefer than any of the
other books to this journalist, and it really is very
sort of um like a Curasawa film, Like this elderly
Tibetan man just kind of wanders out of the fog
one day and it's like, I will help you find
the pandas. And they have a picture in that article
(15:19):
of an elderly Tibetan man. So I presume it is
in fact accurate and non embellishment, but it seems so surreal.
I thought I thought you were going to say there
were seven different versions of what happened. No, not quite.
In November, they set up four different camps, and they
were guided to do so by information that pandas don't
make nests and instead have this more nomadic lifestyle. It
(15:43):
was only a few days before things started to get interesting.
They heard noises in the forest and then a gunshot
the air was full of a really heavy mist, so
the visibility was almost non existent. Ruth have been extremely
clear with her team that she did not want anyone
to shoot the pandas so in the heaviness, they really
were not sure what was going on. Yeah, she describes
(16:04):
being very terrified in that moment. She didn't know if
they were in danger because they did you know. This
was the time when China was going through some upheavals
and they did, at one point, you know, encounter UM
soldiers on their journeys and other you know people, So
she didn't know if they were walking into something dangerous
or if someone had shot a panda from her group,
even though she had asked them not to. But Quentin
(16:25):
decided that he would explore the area and he uh
discovered in a hollowed out tree a tiny panda cub
and he thought that someone may have shot the mother
and that might have been the shot they heard, although
that was never established with certainty. Uh Still, he tucked
the cub into his shirt and he climbed back down
(16:45):
to the ground with it. The panda was later named
Sulin after one of Quentin's relatives, which was his sister
in law. Who was quite an explorer in her own right,
um and would make a great podcast subject in the future.
She's on my list. Mrs Harkners cared for the cub
as the team made its way back to chong Do
and then to Shanghai, and she had no experience in
(17:08):
caring for babies, so she pretty much went with her
intuition and did the best that she could. The porters
that she and Quinton Young had hired two turns carrying
the baby panda and baskets and between feedings. Um. And incidentally,
while the panda was given a woman's name, it turned
out to be a boy. Yeah. Yeah, poor Ruth. She
(17:28):
you know, had never been a mother. She had no
experience caring for human babies. So even though she was like,
I'll just you know, try to do my best with
the cub as though it's a baby, and she's like, wait,
I don't know what to do with babies either. Well,
in panda cubs require some pretty specific care. Yeah, and
she was making it all up as she went along. Um.
When she arrived in Shanghai, she did take the cub
(17:50):
to a doctor to have it looked over and make
sure it was okay, and it apparently passed, so getting
Sulan out of China proved to be a kind of
a challenge. The panda cub was seized by customs officials
in Shanghai and the ship that she had booked passage
on left port, so Ruth wound up remaining in China,
choosing to stay in the custom shed with the panda overnight. Yeah,
(18:12):
she didn't want to leave sulim Uh. And the next
day Harkness and the panda were finally released and they
were allowed to, you know, book another passage and head
to the US. But there was a little bit of
paperwork juggling because the cub actually ended up listing on
the customs document as a dog. So there are a
few theories about whether or not she used her wealth
(18:34):
to kind of finagle that, or if she just charmed someone,
or if there was some sort of a lucky accident
to the whole thing, but Sulian was listed as a dog. Uh.
They traveled back to the US on a luxury ship,
so Sulian definitely got a taste of a high life.
They first landed in San Francisco and then they went
on to Chicago from there, and then they finally went
(18:55):
back to Manhattan. And what's sort of interesting about this
is that throughout the journey, uh Ruth kept Sulin with her.
She basically carried this panda in her arms everywhere she went.
It rode in cabs with her, it went to restaurants
with her, and went to parties with her, and then
when she got to New York, it actually lived with
her in her New York apartment. So on the one hand,
(19:15):
this sounds like the case of a rich lady doing
something eccentric uh with having an animal as an accessory,
but really, her inclination to keep the baby panda close
to her was probably pretty beneficial to it. She wanted
to keep it safe. Although there was significant press and
exposure surrounding her being the panda, Lady Ruth and Sulin
(19:37):
were front page news for weeks and wound up on
numerous radio programs. Yeah, the there have been some that
have theorized that her keeping it with her all the
time up against her body kind of gave it the
necessary body heat, because you know, babies are very susceptible,
even for babies to losing their body heat very quickly
when they're young, so it probably did help it that
she was clinging with it well, and baby pandas also
(19:58):
their digestive systems are not actually built to digest anything,
and so the mother has to move the baby around
all the time. So if she was carrying the baby
panda around that badly did help. Yeah, she's sort of accidentally,
whether it was intuition or a lucky accident, she ended
up doing the right thing to some degree. Uh. However,
eventually Sulan was handed over to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Uh.
(20:19):
They bought it from Ruth for a little less than
nine thousand dollars, and while it was on exhibit at Brookfield,
the panda drew record breaking crowds. In a single day,
more than fifty three thousand people showed up to see
this panda cub because it was a completely exotic creature.
And before we go on uh to talk about Ruth
(20:41):
and Sulin and some additional adventures, let's have a quick
add from our sponsor. So back to the next phase
in Ruth Harkness her expeditions. In seven, Harkness returned to
China to collect another panda, and this time she was
not as well repaired. She seemed to be sort of
(21:01):
counting on a simple repeat of what had happened the
last time. But things did not work out that way.
You Uh. For one thing, the real sort of dramatic
problem was that she got back to China and discovered
that Quentin Young had gotten married in the time that
she was away, and he was not going to be
available to join her, and I presume certainly not to
continue their romantic relationship. Uh, you never know, you never know.
(21:26):
I'm not judging, I'm just saying it didn't seem to
work out. Despite the fact that much of her success
on her first expedition really was due to the guidework
of Young, she you know, ever a bit obstinate. I mean,
this is the woman whose friends were telling her you're crazy,
You're crazy when she first decided on all of this,
and she kind of dug in her heels as a consequence, Like,
I think she's one of those people that really is
(21:48):
motivated to do things in spite of what other people
are telling her. So even though it seems like maybe
not the smartest thing to go without Quentin Young, she
was like, I'm going to do it anyway, and she did,
and she did manage to capture another panda cub on
her own. This one was named May May, and this
new cub joined Sulin on exhibit at the Brickfield Zoo,
but Suland developed pneumonia and died shortly after the arrival
(22:11):
of the second cub. Yeah, there are actually some interesting
differences of accounts of what happened to seulin um. I
read one, and I couldn't corroborate it anywhere, but I
just want to mention it off hand in case any
of our listeners go looking and find it and say,
this isn't what they said. One account said that he
had actually choked on a piece of food, like on
a piece of bamboo that had lodged in his throat,
(22:33):
and that he didn't die from the choking, but then
he ended up getting a secondary infection from where it
had either punctured something or um whatever. And one newspaper
wrote it up as him having died of curiosity, which
is sort of horrible and I don't know, it just
rubbed me the wrong way. Uh, But most accounts say
that he died of pneumonia. Uh. There was a third
(22:54):
trip that Harkness went on in and this really proved
to be a signific I can't shift in her life,
and a big turning point she was successful and once
again getting a cub, but before she could return to
the States with it, she really experienced a pretty significant
change of heart about the whole business. So in the
two years since she captured su Lan, all kinds of
(23:17):
hunters from all over the world had gone on pandiquests
of their own, and they weren't generally approaching them with
the same good intentions that had guided Harkness. So on
top of that, two cubs she had transported previously had
died in transit, and all this kind of weight on
her and she was contemplating the area where she had
captured this third cub, which is near where she had
(23:38):
had gotten both Sulan and Maymay, and Ruth was very
troubled when she realized that there was a significant visible
to her drop in the number of pandas in this
bamboo forest and her intent, she said when she relayed
sort of what was going through her mind at this
time was that she had, you know, envisioned bringing mating
pairs back to the Western world and kind of you know,
(24:00):
fostering a panda population in the US. But things were
not going as planned. Uh, So instead of bringing another
panda to the US and risking its life in the process,
she made a really unusual choice and she trekked back
up the mountain and returned the baby panda to the wild.
So this was a really detrimental move for Harkness. She
(24:22):
had been a moneyed party girl and at this point
she had really spent a lot of her fortune on
these expeditions, So returning the panda was a huge blow
to her finances. Yeah, she wasn't going to get the
publicity and the the you know, cost of the panda back. Uh,
people were probably not going to want to interview her
(24:42):
a whole bunch about. Oh, I felt bad and put
it back. Um May May was in captivity for about
five years, but she died very young. In then Ruth,
leaving behind her trips to China, developed a drink problem. Yeah.
While she had been traveling initially in China, Harkness had
(25:05):
really come to embrace some of the people of the
area and the concepts of Eastern spirituality. And when she
would write letters to Perky and other friends, she really
talked about how she was, you know, kind of getting
into um this Eastern spirituality and learning to let go
of attachments to possessions and people and how it, you know,
had given her this sense of peace and really, you know,
(25:26):
brought a change in her and an ability to sort
of just be in the world. But the sentiment seems
like it may have been kind of one of those
early exposure enthusiasm situations because it did not stay with her. Um.
You know, when she was back in the States, she
never seemed to find, you know, that piece that she
had felt in China, and once she was permanently back
(25:47):
in New York, she just kind of spiraled downward. On
July tw n she was found dead in a hotel bathtub,
and her death was ruled the result of acute alcoholic
gastro enteritis. Yeah, it's a very sad end for her. Uh. However,
she has an interesting legacy. Um. There is a book,
(26:07):
like it's the book that most people kind of point at, uh,
written about Harkness, which is called The Lady in the Panda,
and it's very very fascinating, But in reading it, I
kind of feel like the author Vicky Croak, and she
does a really good job with the book, but it
feels a little bit romanticized to me. She kind of
paints Harknesses as a hero character and describes her as
(26:28):
a combination of Myrna Loy and Jane Goodall, which sounds
really good, but it also sounds pretty idealized. But at
the same time, she really was an extraordinary woman. So
I want to be clear that I don't know how
much of my own sort of perception and filters or
affecting my read of it. Uh. Well, and she did
alter the way the public perceived animals. She brought Sulian
(26:49):
home to New York in her arms instead of at
least or cage. You know, she was tweating like a
baby instead of like a thing that should be put
a box. She asserted that animals had individuality and personality
just like humans do, but because she was not a
trained biologist, her message kind of anthropomorphized pandas, which is
(27:10):
a little problematic. Yeah, this is an issue which you know,
continues to be discussed and debated. But once people perceive
an animal is human, like you know, the study of
them becomes subjective. In the case of such a high
profile animal, it can be a little bit detrimental in
terms of the public perception and the consequential misconceptions that
grow out of it. So pandas are I mean, I
(27:33):
think you would be hard pressed to find someone who
does not acknowledge that pandas are super cute. So it's
easy for people to start thinking them as cute pets
and like these sweet things rather than wild animals. But
as you said earlier, they are wild bears. They do
not want to be your friend, even though they look
really chill and adorable when they're rolling around in their
habitats and zeus, they're not. They're not humans and they're
(27:56):
not pets. They're they're their own thing. Well, and there's
a lot of ongoing debate about anthropomorphism, so these are
kind of the broad strokes. Anthropomorphism can be detrimental to
the study of animal cognition, and it can negatively impact
our body of knowledge about animals when it comes to
an endangered animal, and you know, giant handles are the
(28:17):
poster animals for endangement, it has the potential to get
in the way of conservation efforts. Yeah, I mean, most biologists,
certainly that I have known, they try to stay really
objective about it, but it's a fight. I mean, I've
certainly talked to people that have said, like, no, I
have to constantly remind myself like I'm working with an animal.
This is not a human. I can't assume it's intent
(28:37):
in its behaviors. And so, you know, if you're always
struggling with something like that, it's not like you know,
being able to put a piece of a drop of
blood on a slide and look at it. You're interpreting
things that animals are doing, and so it's really hard
to stay on guard. So that's why anthropomorphism can be
really tricky. Well, and it's like nature centers that are
really focused on conservation and preservation, a lot of times
(28:59):
the animals that are there don't have names. Um, and
you know, somebody say, what is this fox's name? And
it's well, it doesn't have a name. It's a wild animal.
It's not someone's pet. So in a two thousand four census,
it was estimated that there were only around sixteen hundred
giant pandas in the wild and about three hundred zoos.
A lot of biologists actually think these numbers are a
(29:21):
lot lower, especially in captivity. Female pandas really can have
trouble conceiving and their fertility windows are really narrow, sometimes
as low as twelve to twenty four hours in a year. Yeah,
they once each spring they become fertile. Um Tricie actually
wrote an article for the site about it that I'm
in a reference in just a minute. Uh. And because
(29:42):
of their reclusive natures, though, almost everything we know about
these endangered bears is from the study of captive animals.
So again it's one of those things where they're pros
and cons to the situation. Uh. You know, sometimes it's
hard to see an animal in a captive situation, even
if it's in the best possible, you know, very perfectly
(30:02):
designed environment. But at the same time, if we didn't
have them in captivity, we would not know anything about
them and would not be as informed to you know,
kind of pursue conservation efforts. So there are two sides
to that coin. And today, giant pandas living in US
facilities actually still belong to China. It's not a situation
like Ruth Hardness where she could go get one and
(30:23):
then sell it here. They are all owned by China. Uh.
If you see a panda in the US zoo, it
is leased by the Chinese government, and those leasing fees
actually go back into a fund that is used to
further the study and conservation of giant pandas in their
native home. Uh The Giant Panda Reserve at Woolong has
been pretty successful at kind of figuring out how to
(30:47):
breed pandas. It's still tricky. There's still a lot of
work to be done, but they are getting to a
point where they feel like they will soon be able
to reintroduce panda's born in captivity into the wild and
start bolstering their wild numbers. Yeah, having a having a
panda in a zoo as an enormous financial commitment. It's
really huge any animal in a zoo. I think that's
(31:07):
some of those things people don't realize when they say,
why are tickets to this place? It's so expensive and
it's like, okay, keeping a whale alive for a year
across like a million dollars. Well, and on top of all,
you know, the food in the habitat and all that stuff.
Like the amount of money that the zoo gives to
China for panda conservation research is enormous um. Sue Lynn
is still viewable in taxid army form along with the
(31:29):
Tzavo lions. He's on display in the Field Museum's taxidermy exhibit. Yeah,
I feel like we should get a kickback from the Field.
We send people there all the time. So that he
tweeted at us that they had gone to the American
Museum of Natural History and to see the lines, and
I was like, oh, no, that's wrong. Museum there in
the Field. Oh man, I love the Field. I gotta
get back here soon. Uh. And while the Ruth the
work of Ruth Harkness draws varying opinions, as we've said,
(31:51):
there are two sides to the whole kind of capturing
of an animal. Coin in this situation, at a time
when shooting exotic beasts for sport was happen things, she
really did shift the public thinking on pandas into one
of adoration. She's sometimes credited, you'll see like in quick
bios of hers, she's the woman that started the panda craze,
which is kind of an interesting phrase anyway, But you
(32:15):
know this this shift in mindset where people suddenly saw
it as a sweet thing, Let's find the interesting animal
and protect it instead of let's find the interesting animal
and shooting until it is dead. Yeah, So she's she's
had a significant impact on how we view not just pandas,
but many other animals. I think it it kind of
shifted the way biologists and zoologists were thinking about them
(32:37):
at the time. At some point those people recognize that, like,
you can know everything about zoology that you know, but
you're gonna need to get people that are not educated
in biology and science on board with you if you're
gonna get the funding to keep these efforts going, right,
That's part of it. Do you also have listener mail?
I do several pieces of listener mail. Don't mean to
(33:00):
keep talking about animals, but I do. We got a
bunch of male about the Red Ghost of Arizona and
the camel Core and I picked a couple because, as
we've said before, we can't always answer everybody and we
can't always read everybody's but I try to do a few,
and so that's why our first one is from our listener, right, Anne,
(33:21):
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. This is I made
flappy hands of delight when I realized what this episode
is about. When I was in elementary school, I had
this book and I may still have it somewhere called
Ghostly Animals of America. And the Phantasmic Colorado was one
of the stories in it. The book had nineteen different
stories of ghost horses and dogs are mostly horses and dogs,
(33:41):
and Virginia Dare is a ghost dear on Roanoke Island
because of course, and a bit of the history surrounding
the tail, and then instructions on how to find the
locations that the story was about. The Phantasmic Colorado was
the story that scared me the most because the picture
was scary. I hear you, some of the drawings are
scary and all caps. There was a dead guy strapped
to the poor camel's back. I agree. It's very sort
(34:03):
of gruesive and grim. Uh this is ironic as even
the book is like, hey, not actually a ghost camel,
probably just a real camel. But the book also started
my collection of locally published ghost stories. Whenever I travel
someplace new, I get a book on that area's ghost stories.
It's a great and unique way to revisit the places
I've been. I love that story, I love that that
(34:24):
that approach. It's a good that's a girl, that's good souvenirs.
Our next email is from our listener, Danielle. She says
I've just listened to your podcast about the Red Ghost
of Arizona and found it interesting when you were speculating
what would happen if camels became a pest on the
same scale of rabbits in Australia. In fact, camels are
also a pest here in Australia, having been introduced originally
(34:46):
for exploration missions into the central deserts by explorers like
Burke and Wills. Thousands of camels were introduced, but once
automobiles became more common, the camels were just loosed into
the outback. They thrived far better here than in the States,
and a survey in two thousand eight showed we had
about one million feral camels roaming central and Western Australia.
I had no idea that's so cool. I mean, it's
(35:06):
not necessarily cool, but it's a cool fact. I don't
think that's actually cool. It's a cool fact to know,
she says. In fact, there were more wild camels in
Australia than in the regions from whence they originally came,
as they are predominantly domesticated in the Africa, Africa, Indo
China regions. As part of a plan to control the
population of feral camels. There's now an industry of trading
camels and camel products, including meat, which I have to
(35:27):
imagine has a very strong flavor. Two places such as
Saudi Arabia, where camels are part of the culture, camel
racing is a thing I would be really interested to
see one day. That is also very cool. We had
a listener, and I'm sorry that I didn't make a
note of it because I'm just remembering it now on
Facebook mentioned that I think it was that she thought
that she had read somewhere that they had um gelded
(35:49):
the camels that had come over, and I could never
find anything to corroborate that in my research, but I
suspected something like that might have also been the case,
since they did not thrive, even though the vironment seems
pretty ideal for them. So uh, it would certainly make
sense for a number of reasons. I mean, I just
think about the smell, but to be sort of biologically
(36:11):
gross about it. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at our new ISSH email address.
We're still here. Everything is staying more or less the same,
emails changing. It's gonna be history. Podcasts and at how
stuff works dot com. You can also still connect with
us at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, on Twitter,
at misston history, at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
(36:32):
and at pinterest dot com slash missed in history. If
you would like to learn more about pandas who doesn't,
you can go to housto works dot com and type
in the word pandas in the search bar and you'll
get a few different articles, including why don't pandas hibernate?
And why is the birthrate solo for giant Panda's which
Tracy wrote it is a very long time ago, and
it kind of talks about how in captivity it's been
(36:53):
very tricky. They're more successful on their own out in
the wild, and why those things are the case, uh,
and why it's a little bit difficult to uh, to
keep panda going in in captive situations. You can also
visit us on our own website, which is missed in
history dot com, and you can study almost anything you
like on our parent website, which is how staff works
(37:13):
dot com and how could you do? For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from stock
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
I'm Tracy Wilson, and uh, this is actually a topic
that I've had on my which lift almost at the
beginning of when we came on. I know I've said,
(00:23):
I said, I'd think in the last couple of weeks
that I have been trying to go back to some
of those original ones I was really excited about and
work um in. But this is one that I really
wrestled with because the material is a little bit emotionally
difficult for me for like sort of silly, crazy animal
lady reasons. It's the story of one of those odd
ambitions that only uh, the privileged are really afforded. But
(00:47):
in the nineteen thirties and New York socialite had this dream, uh,
and that dream was to be the first person to
capture a panda from Asia and returned to the Western
world with it. And it's a as I said, it's
something I wrestle with a little bit. Um. I've been
very open that I am an animal person and I
struggle with the concept of animals and captivity. And I'm
sure many of our listeners have similar feelings. I see
(01:09):
both sides of the issue. I volunteered with zoos and
aquariums before, and I really love it. Um. You know,
captive animals in accredited facilities increased public awareness and they
provide a situation where the animals can be studied, they
can bolster conservation efforts. But you know, there's part of
me that has to acknowledge that that is not the
natural state for those animals. So, as I said, I
(01:31):
struggle with it. Probably other people do too. And this
is an important kind of uh touchstone in the development
of animals and captivity in the United States. UH. And so,
for example, the first time a Westerner even saw a panda,
it was not alive. It was a pelpone display in
a private home. And that was back in eighteen sixty nine.
And once UH, Europe and the US kind of got
(01:54):
ahold of this knowledge, it sort of fed into a
time when exploring other lands and kind of a little
bit of a conquering mentality was going on, and particularly
in the realm of animals, there was a lot of
We're discovering new animals all the time. Well, there was
also a strain of orientalism at the time, and because
panda's are native to China, that definitely fed the fire
(02:15):
of it. Uh, and it really ended up kicking off
an obsession in the Western world with finding these black
and white bears that seemed so exotic. And in the
early half of the twentieth century, one woman who we
will talk about today, this person I spoke of at
the very beginning, really catapulted the giant panda onto the
world stage and she made the species of media darling
(02:36):
to some degree. So we're going to talk about Ruth Harkness.
So Ruth Macombs Harkness was not born into money, she
married into it. She actually came from pretty humble origins.
Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a seamstress,
and they made their home in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She was
born on September twenty one and she had three siblings.
(02:59):
The conservative atmosphere of the home life of the Macombs
was not really something that Ruth was comfortable with. She
had a little bit of edge to her. She knew
there was more in the world that she wanted to discover. Uh.
She became an avid reader as a consequence, and UH,
the entry in her senior yearbook under her mature kind
of is a great encapsulation of what she was like
(03:21):
at this time, and it says, quote, Ruth is rather
hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her,
you find that she has many good qualities and is
a friend worth having. I started the look it sounds
like something Mary Poppins would say about someone who is difficult.
I just really really loved that. Ruth tried out college
at the University of Colorado, but she only lasted a
(03:42):
semester before heading to Cuba briefly to work as an
English teacher, but that really did not suit her either.
She had a little bit of wanderlust, uh, and she
was hitting her twenties, of course, just as the jazz
age was kicking off, and so Ruth moved to New York,
allegedly I think, with like twenty five bucks to her name,
and she got a job there as a dress designer,
and she was basically kind of designing uh outfits that
(04:05):
kind of were knockoffs of what was going on in
Paris at the time, and she very quickly and very
fully embraced the decadent aspects of flapper lifestyle. She really
became a quintessential party girl. She was a heavy drinker.
She was a heavy smoker, and she had this personality
though that was really perfectly suited to social life and
kind of becoming a social darling. Her friends described her
(04:27):
as very smart and very witty, and she had a
very commanding presence. She was just sort of bubbly and
outspoken and kind of the perfect It was a perfect
time for a girl like her to really make her
way in the city. During this time, Ruth met William
Harvest Harkness, Jr. And he was wealthy and had a
Harvard education. Bill's father was a high powered attorney, and
(04:50):
the young man was a regular in the society pages.
The two of them were really drawn together and kind
of an opposite attract scenario. Yeah, Bill was much quieter
and more reserve, uh, But he was also really well
traveled and he spoke many languages, which really appealed to Ruth.
And what really bonded them as a couple is that
(05:10):
they both loved reading, and they would read together in
trade books and discuss the things that they had read
in the books. And they also spent a great deal
of time just pouring over maps and travel journals and
kind of plotting these grand adventures that they really hoped
to take together one day. And this was not like
the fantasy kind of planning of like one day we'll
run away and spend three months in Paris. Like they
(05:32):
were really planning some trips. Uh. And they ended up
dating for quite some time before they finally married, although
uh some accounts say they basically were living as married people,
like they just didn't make it all official in paperworky
for a while. So, with the financial backing of his
family money, Bill Harkness made an adventurer slash explorer his occupation,
(05:54):
which is awesome work if you can get it, if
you could make it for yourself. Right. So this was
a time when new animals are being discovered all the time,
and men like Bill would race to be the first
to capture and sometimes kill one of them. Yeah, it
was a you know kind of that that sense of
adventure we've talked about before. It was what fed a
(06:15):
lot of like the Everest expeditions, but like being the
first to do the thing, to see this animal, to
capture this animal. There was a lot of like a
claim that went with that. And Bill had just had
a successful expedition to capture a Komodo dragon, which I
would love to do more research on that trip specifically,
because those things are poisonous and me and not delightful.
(06:38):
They do not want hugs. But he, you know, it
was sort of chuffed with his success from me, and
he decided that he was going to be the first
man to capture a giant panda. And this was in
four when he kind of mounted this plan, and so
he made a trip to China, but he got a
little blockaded. He ended up spending the next year or
(07:00):
there in China just waiting for the proper permit paperwork
to all be approved, because it was not an easy
thing to just stroll in and put your team together
and go. But unfortunately, before his expedition could actually get
underway and all of that paper work could happen, Bill
became very ill, uh and he was treated for a while,
but he ended up dying on February eighteenth of nineteen
(07:21):
thirty six in Shanghai, and his illness, which was not
initially accurately diagnosed, turned out to be throat cancer. So
he had basically been withering away while he waited for
these documents. Although his missives back to Ruth were all
very peppy and upbeat. So when Bill died, Ruth inherited
his money, and she also inherited the expedition equipment that
(07:44):
he had already assembled in China. So, in a move
that completely shocked all of her socialite friends, Ruth, Ruth
decided that instead of settling into life as a wealthy widow,
she would travel to China and pick up where Bill
left off. Yeah, this was really, uh a wild move.
I mean she was basically saying, all that money and
(08:05):
I inherit it, I'm not going to live off of it.
I'm going to spend it all to go to China
and do what my husband was trying to do. Uh.
And you know, this certainly seems like a crazy move
for a woman who fully embraced creature comforts. I mean,
she was very open that she like sort of living
her spoiled life in New York and like she wouldn't
walk a block if she could take a cab and uh,
(08:26):
so it seemed very surprising too many people for her
to just go, no, I'm gonna go do that trip
my husband was on. But really what motivated her was
likely just a very deep grief because as we said
it wasn't opposite attract scenario. And Ruth and Bill at
this point had been together for a decade and they
were very happily married and very close partners. They were
(08:46):
basically best friends. But before we get to Ruth traveling
off to China, Uh, we're gonna take a quick ad
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dot com and enter stuff. So back to Ruth's adventures.
Most of what we knew about Ruth's first journey is
through her letters to her best friend, Hazel Perkins, who
was nicknamed Perky, and so once Ruth arrived in Shanghai,
she really took a different approach to the mission than
was customary and certainly different than the way Bill had
(10:38):
handled things. Whereas normally Western explorers would go into a
new place like this on these adventure and discovery expeditions
with a team of fellow Westerners and they would lay
out their plan and follow it. Ruth got rid of
all of the men that he had already hired and
brought on, and she opted to seek out locals as
her guides and her employees, at least almost locals. She
(11:01):
ended up hiring Quentin Young, and he was a young
Chinese American college student as her god. She said of him,
when Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition,
the obstacles that he had surrounded me began to disappear.
In fact, the Chinese wall of it can't be done,
crumpled like the walls of Jericho. Yeah, this was not
(11:21):
the Young family's first time assisting Americans with panda expeditions.
Quentin's younger brother, Jack had actually led Teddy Roosevelt's sons
on a giant panda hunting expedition in nine and in
this case, the goal which was achieved was strictly to
hunt the animal. With Jack's assistance, the Roosevelt boys shot
(11:42):
and killed a giant panda and returned home with it
as a hunting trophy, giving them the dubious honor of
being the first Americans to kill a panda. Quinton knew
the areas of Tibet where their travels were going to
take them, and his guidance in this expedition really can't
be understated. He was fluent in Chinese as well as English,
and he was able to handle virtually every logistical need
(12:04):
of Mrs harkness ambitious plan. Yeah. I mean, this is
a woman who she uh you know, was used to
getting everything she wanted, and he kind of made that
happen for her again. In China, Uh and Harkness and
Young left Shanghai on September twenty six and nineteen thirty six,
and they traveled up the Yancey River for several weeks
before reaching cheng Do, which is the capital of Sichuan Province,
(12:27):
and there they hired a complement of servants to carry loads,
and they also hired a cook before they started their
journey into the Tibetan highlands. What they wanted to do
was to capture a baby panda. Harkness carried a supply
of items that she thought would help her care for
a baby panda, so she had nursing bottles and dry milk.
Through her letters to Perkey, she mentioned that no one
(12:50):
really knew how to care for a panda, but she
seemed enthusiastic and confident about her plan, and her idea
to acquire an infant was actually another departure for the
usual approach. Previous expeditions to capture a panda uh and
ones that were you know, being mounted around the same
time always intended to bring back an adult. But that
was really quite problematic for a number of reasons. Uh. First,
(13:14):
no matter how cute pandas are, uh, they are wild bears.
They do not want to be disturbed. They do not
want your hugs anymore than the komodo dragons do. Uh.
The equipment for the capture would also be extremely cumbersome,
so they would have to have porters to carry chains
like heavy chains and traps and cages for an adult animal.
And additionally, just transporting an adult would also mean that
(13:35):
you had to deal with an adult panda's appetite, which
would have included carrying a great deal of bamboo back
along with it. Just to sustain it through the journey.
Trying to get a cub instead solved most of these problems. Yeah,
smaller package, less fuss with not so much bamboot boardage. No,
not at all. Uh So the team traveled up to
(13:56):
thirty miles a day on foot, and sometimes the temperatures
got incredibly high, uh, north of a hundred degrees fahrenheit.
And you would think that, uh, someone who had been
living in privilege for so long would really struggle with it,
but surprisingly Ruth apparently did extremely well on the journey.
She was just driven and she you know, hoofed it
all those miles. And sometimes when she would get tired,
(14:17):
the porters would kind of make a hammock style chair
for her that she could rest in for a little
while and they would carry her for a bit. But
mostly she did it under her own steerage there um,
so she really you know, kind of stepped up to
the bar. And also during this journey, at some point
Harkness and her guide Quentin Young became romantically involved. This
(14:39):
group was eventually met by an elderly Tibetan man. He
was named Loud Saying, and he said that the word
had reached him that a Western woman was looking for
a panda. He said he knew where to find them,
and he offered his services, so he and his son
in law joined the group as they headed into the
bamboo forest. Yeah, when she I read an article on
(14:59):
a link in show notes, and it's kind of her
relaying her story. It's much briefer than any of the
other books to this journalist, and it really is very
sort of um like a Curasawa film, Like this elderly
Tibetan man just kind of wanders out of the fog
one day and it's like, I will help you find
the pandas. And they have a picture in that article
(15:19):
of an elderly Tibetan man. So I presume it is
in fact accurate and non embellishment, but it seems so surreal.
I thought I thought you were going to say there
were seven different versions of what happened. No, not quite.
In November, they set up four different camps, and they
were guided to do so by information that pandas don't
make nests and instead have this more nomadic lifestyle. It
(15:43):
was only a few days before things started to get interesting.
They heard noises in the forest and then a gunshot
the air was full of a really heavy mist, so
the visibility was almost non existent. Ruth have been extremely
clear with her team that she did not want anyone
to shoot the pandas so in the heaviness, they really
were not sure what was going on. Yeah, she describes
(16:04):
being very terrified in that moment. She didn't know if
they were in danger because they did you know. This
was the time when China was going through some upheavals
and they did, at one point, you know, encounter UM
soldiers on their journeys and other you know people, So
she didn't know if they were walking into something dangerous
or if someone had shot a panda from her group,
even though she had asked them not to. But Quentin
(16:25):
decided that he would explore the area and he uh
discovered in a hollowed out tree a tiny panda cub
and he thought that someone may have shot the mother
and that might have been the shot they heard, although
that was never established with certainty. Uh Still, he tucked
the cub into his shirt and he climbed back down
(16:45):
to the ground with it. The panda was later named
Sulin after one of Quentin's relatives, which was his sister
in law. Who was quite an explorer in her own right,
um and would make a great podcast subject in the future.
She's on my list. Mrs Harkners cared for the cub
as the team made its way back to chong Do
and then to Shanghai, and she had no experience in
(17:08):
caring for babies, so she pretty much went with her
intuition and did the best that she could. The porters
that she and Quinton Young had hired two turns carrying
the baby panda and baskets and between feedings. Um. And incidentally,
while the panda was given a woman's name, it turned
out to be a boy. Yeah. Yeah, poor Ruth. She
(17:28):
you know, had never been a mother. She had no
experience caring for human babies. So even though she was like,
I'll just you know, try to do my best with
the cub as though it's a baby, and she's like, wait,
I don't know what to do with babies either. Well,
in panda cubs require some pretty specific care. Yeah, and
she was making it all up as she went along. Um.
When she arrived in Shanghai, she did take the cub
(17:50):
to a doctor to have it looked over and make
sure it was okay, and it apparently passed, so getting
Sulan out of China proved to be a kind of
a challenge. The panda cub was seized by customs officials
in Shanghai and the ship that she had booked passage
on left port, so Ruth wound up remaining in China,
choosing to stay in the custom shed with the panda overnight. Yeah,
(18:12):
she didn't want to leave sulim Uh. And the next
day Harkness and the panda were finally released and they
were allowed to, you know, book another passage and head
to the US. But there was a little bit of
paperwork juggling because the cub actually ended up listing on
the customs document as a dog. So there are a
few theories about whether or not she used her wealth
(18:34):
to kind of finagle that, or if she just charmed someone,
or if there was some sort of a lucky accident
to the whole thing, but Sulian was listed as a dog. Uh.
They traveled back to the US on a luxury ship,
so Sulian definitely got a taste of a high life.
They first landed in San Francisco and then they went
on to Chicago from there, and then they finally went
(18:55):
back to Manhattan. And what's sort of interesting about this
is that throughout the journey, uh Ruth kept Sulin with her.
She basically carried this panda in her arms everywhere she went.
It rode in cabs with her, it went to restaurants
with her, and went to parties with her, and then
when she got to New York, it actually lived with
her in her New York apartment. So on the one hand,
(19:15):
this sounds like the case of a rich lady doing
something eccentric uh with having an animal as an accessory,
but really, her inclination to keep the baby panda close
to her was probably pretty beneficial to it. She wanted
to keep it safe. Although there was significant press and
exposure surrounding her being the panda, Lady Ruth and Sulin
(19:37):
were front page news for weeks and wound up on
numerous radio programs. Yeah, the there have been some that
have theorized that her keeping it with her all the
time up against her body kind of gave it the
necessary body heat, because you know, babies are very susceptible,
even for babies to losing their body heat very quickly
when they're young, so it probably did help it that
she was clinging with it well, and baby pandas also
(19:58):
their digestive systems are not actually built to digest anything,
and so the mother has to move the baby around
all the time. So if she was carrying the baby
panda around that badly did help. Yeah, she's sort of accidentally,
whether it was intuition or a lucky accident, she ended
up doing the right thing to some degree. Uh. However,
eventually Sulan was handed over to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Uh.
(20:19):
They bought it from Ruth for a little less than
nine thousand dollars, and while it was on exhibit at Brookfield,
the panda drew record breaking crowds. In a single day,
more than fifty three thousand people showed up to see
this panda cub because it was a completely exotic creature.
And before we go on uh to talk about Ruth
(20:41):
and Sulin and some additional adventures, let's have a quick
add from our sponsor. So back to the next phase
in Ruth Harkness her expeditions. In seven, Harkness returned to
China to collect another panda, and this time she was
not as well repaired. She seemed to be sort of
(21:01):
counting on a simple repeat of what had happened the
last time. But things did not work out that way.
You Uh. For one thing, the real sort of dramatic
problem was that she got back to China and discovered
that Quentin Young had gotten married in the time that
she was away, and he was not going to be
available to join her, and I presume certainly not to
continue their romantic relationship. Uh, you never know, you never know.
(21:26):
I'm not judging, I'm just saying it didn't seem to
work out. Despite the fact that much of her success
on her first expedition really was due to the guidework
of Young, she you know, ever a bit obstinate. I mean,
this is the woman whose friends were telling her you're crazy,
You're crazy when she first decided on all of this,
and she kind of dug in her heels as a consequence, Like,
I think she's one of those people that really is
(21:48):
motivated to do things in spite of what other people
are telling her. So even though it seems like maybe
not the smartest thing to go without Quentin Young, she
was like, I'm going to do it anyway, and she did,
and she did manage to capture another panda cub on
her own. This one was named May May, and this
new cub joined Sulin on exhibit at the Brickfield Zoo,
but Suland developed pneumonia and died shortly after the arrival
(22:11):
of the second cub. Yeah, there are actually some interesting
differences of accounts of what happened to seulin um. I
read one, and I couldn't corroborate it anywhere, but I
just want to mention it off hand in case any
of our listeners go looking and find it and say,
this isn't what they said. One account said that he
had actually choked on a piece of food, like on
a piece of bamboo that had lodged in his throat,
(22:33):
and that he didn't die from the choking, but then
he ended up getting a secondary infection from where it
had either punctured something or um whatever. And one newspaper
wrote it up as him having died of curiosity, which
is sort of horrible and I don't know, it just
rubbed me the wrong way. Uh, But most accounts say
that he died of pneumonia. Uh. There was a third
(22:54):
trip that Harkness went on in and this really proved
to be a signific I can't shift in her life,
and a big turning point she was successful and once
again getting a cub, but before she could return to
the States with it, she really experienced a pretty significant
change of heart about the whole business. So in the
two years since she captured su Lan, all kinds of
(23:17):
hunters from all over the world had gone on pandiquests
of their own, and they weren't generally approaching them with
the same good intentions that had guided Harkness. So on
top of that, two cubs she had transported previously had
died in transit, and all this kind of weight on
her and she was contemplating the area where she had
captured this third cub, which is near where she had
(23:38):
had gotten both Sulan and Maymay, and Ruth was very
troubled when she realized that there was a significant visible
to her drop in the number of pandas in this
bamboo forest and her intent, she said when she relayed
sort of what was going through her mind at this
time was that she had, you know, envisioned bringing mating
pairs back to the Western world and kind of you know,
(24:00):
fostering a panda population in the US. But things were
not going as planned. Uh, So instead of bringing another
panda to the US and risking its life in the process,
she made a really unusual choice and she trekked back
up the mountain and returned the baby panda to the wild.
So this was a really detrimental move for Harkness. She
(24:22):
had been a moneyed party girl and at this point
she had really spent a lot of her fortune on
these expeditions, So returning the panda was a huge blow
to her finances. Yeah, she wasn't going to get the
publicity and the the you know, cost of the panda back. Uh,
people were probably not going to want to interview her
(24:42):
a whole bunch about. Oh, I felt bad and put
it back. Um May May was in captivity for about
five years, but she died very young. In then Ruth,
leaving behind her trips to China, developed a drink problem. Yeah.
While she had been traveling initially in China, Harkness had
(25:05):
really come to embrace some of the people of the
area and the concepts of Eastern spirituality. And when she
would write letters to Perky and other friends, she really
talked about how she was, you know, kind of getting
into um this Eastern spirituality and learning to let go
of attachments to possessions and people and how it, you know,
had given her this sense of peace and really, you know,
(25:26):
brought a change in her and an ability to sort
of just be in the world. But the sentiment seems
like it may have been kind of one of those
early exposure enthusiasm situations because it did not stay with her. Um.
You know, when she was back in the States, she
never seemed to find, you know, that piece that she
had felt in China, and once she was permanently back
(25:47):
in New York, she just kind of spiraled downward. On
July tw n she was found dead in a hotel bathtub,
and her death was ruled the result of acute alcoholic
gastro enteritis. Yeah, it's a very sad end for her. Uh. However,
she has an interesting legacy. Um. There is a book,
(26:07):
like it's the book that most people kind of point at, uh,
written about Harkness, which is called The Lady in the Panda,
and it's very very fascinating, But in reading it, I
kind of feel like the author Vicky Croak, and she
does a really good job with the book, but it
feels a little bit romanticized to me. She kind of
paints Harknesses as a hero character and describes her as
(26:28):
a combination of Myrna Loy and Jane Goodall, which sounds
really good, but it also sounds pretty idealized. But at
the same time, she really was an extraordinary woman. So
I want to be clear that I don't know how
much of my own sort of perception and filters or
affecting my read of it. Uh. Well, and she did
alter the way the public perceived animals. She brought Sulian
(26:49):
home to New York in her arms instead of at
least or cage. You know, she was tweating like a
baby instead of like a thing that should be put
a box. She asserted that animals had individuality and personality
just like humans do, but because she was not a
trained biologist, her message kind of anthropomorphized pandas, which is
(27:10):
a little problematic. Yeah, this is an issue which you know,
continues to be discussed and debated. But once people perceive
an animal is human, like you know, the study of
them becomes subjective. In the case of such a high
profile animal, it can be a little bit detrimental in
terms of the public perception and the consequential misconceptions that
grow out of it. So pandas are I mean, I
(27:33):
think you would be hard pressed to find someone who
does not acknowledge that pandas are super cute. So it's
easy for people to start thinking them as cute pets
and like these sweet things rather than wild animals. But
as you said earlier, they are wild bears. They do
not want to be your friend, even though they look
really chill and adorable when they're rolling around in their
habitats and zeus, they're not. They're not humans and they're
(27:56):
not pets. They're they're their own thing. Well, and there's
a lot of ongoing debate about anthropomorphism, so these are
kind of the broad strokes. Anthropomorphism can be detrimental to
the study of animal cognition, and it can negatively impact
our body of knowledge about animals when it comes to
an endangered animal, and you know, giant handles are the
(28:17):
poster animals for endangement, it has the potential to get
in the way of conservation efforts. Yeah, I mean, most biologists,
certainly that I have known, they try to stay really
objective about it, but it's a fight. I mean, I've
certainly talked to people that have said, like, no, I
have to constantly remind myself like I'm working with an animal.
This is not a human. I can't assume it's intent
(28:37):
in its behaviors. And so, you know, if you're always
struggling with something like that, it's not like you know,
being able to put a piece of a drop of
blood on a slide and look at it. You're interpreting
things that animals are doing, and so it's really hard
to stay on guard. So that's why anthropomorphism can be
really tricky. Well, and it's like nature centers that are
really focused on conservation and preservation, a lot of times
(28:59):
the animals that are there don't have names. Um, and
you know, somebody say, what is this fox's name? And
it's well, it doesn't have a name. It's a wild animal.
It's not someone's pet. So in a two thousand four census,
it was estimated that there were only around sixteen hundred
giant pandas in the wild and about three hundred zoos.
A lot of biologists actually think these numbers are a
(29:21):
lot lower, especially in captivity. Female pandas really can have
trouble conceiving and their fertility windows are really narrow, sometimes
as low as twelve to twenty four hours in a year. Yeah,
they once each spring they become fertile. Um Tricie actually
wrote an article for the site about it that I'm
in a reference in just a minute. Uh. And because
(29:42):
of their reclusive natures, though, almost everything we know about
these endangered bears is from the study of captive animals.
So again it's one of those things where they're pros
and cons to the situation. Uh. You know, sometimes it's
hard to see an animal in a captive situation, even
if it's in the best possible, you know, very perfectly
(30:02):
designed environment. But at the same time, if we didn't
have them in captivity, we would not know anything about
them and would not be as informed to you know,
kind of pursue conservation efforts. So there are two sides
to that coin. And today, giant pandas living in US
facilities actually still belong to China. It's not a situation
like Ruth Hardness where she could go get one and
(30:23):
then sell it here. They are all owned by China. Uh.
If you see a panda in the US zoo, it
is leased by the Chinese government, and those leasing fees
actually go back into a fund that is used to
further the study and conservation of giant pandas in their
native home. Uh The Giant Panda Reserve at Woolong has
been pretty successful at kind of figuring out how to
(30:47):
breed pandas. It's still tricky. There's still a lot of
work to be done, but they are getting to a
point where they feel like they will soon be able
to reintroduce panda's born in captivity into the wild and
start bolstering their wild numbers. Yeah, having a having a
panda in a zoo as an enormous financial commitment. It's
really huge any animal in a zoo. I think that's
(31:07):
some of those things people don't realize when they say,
why are tickets to this place? It's so expensive and
it's like, okay, keeping a whale alive for a year
across like a million dollars. Well, and on top of all,
you know, the food in the habitat and all that stuff.
Like the amount of money that the zoo gives to
China for panda conservation research is enormous um. Sue Lynn
is still viewable in taxid army form along with the
(31:29):
Tzavo lions. He's on display in the Field Museum's taxidermy exhibit. Yeah,
I feel like we should get a kickback from the Field.
We send people there all the time. So that he
tweeted at us that they had gone to the American
Museum of Natural History and to see the lines, and
I was like, oh, no, that's wrong. Museum there in
the Field. Oh man, I love the Field. I gotta
get back here soon. Uh. And while the Ruth the
work of Ruth Harkness draws varying opinions, as we've said,
(31:51):
there are two sides to the whole kind of capturing
of an animal. Coin in this situation, at a time
when shooting exotic beasts for sport was happen things, she
really did shift the public thinking on pandas into one
of adoration. She's sometimes credited, you'll see like in quick
bios of hers, she's the woman that started the panda craze,
which is kind of an interesting phrase anyway, But you
(32:15):
know this this shift in mindset where people suddenly saw
it as a sweet thing, Let's find the interesting animal
and protect it instead of let's find the interesting animal
and shooting until it is dead. Yeah, So she's she's
had a significant impact on how we view not just pandas,
but many other animals. I think it it kind of
shifted the way biologists and zoologists were thinking about them
(32:37):
at the time. At some point those people recognize that, like,
you can know everything about zoology that you know, but
you're gonna need to get people that are not educated
in biology and science on board with you if you're
gonna get the funding to keep these efforts going, right,
That's part of it. Do you also have listener mail?
I do several pieces of listener mail. Don't mean to
(33:00):
keep talking about animals, but I do. We got a
bunch of male about the Red Ghost of Arizona and
the camel Core and I picked a couple because, as
we've said before, we can't always answer everybody and we
can't always read everybody's but I try to do a few,
and so that's why our first one is from our listener, right, Anne,
(33:21):
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. This is I made
flappy hands of delight when I realized what this episode
is about. When I was in elementary school, I had
this book and I may still have it somewhere called
Ghostly Animals of America. And the Phantasmic Colorado was one
of the stories in it. The book had nineteen different
stories of ghost horses and dogs are mostly horses and dogs,
(33:41):
and Virginia Dare is a ghost dear on Roanoke Island
because of course, and a bit of the history surrounding
the tail, and then instructions on how to find the
locations that the story was about. The Phantasmic Colorado was
the story that scared me the most because the picture
was scary. I hear you, some of the drawings are
scary and all caps. There was a dead guy strapped
to the poor camel's back. I agree. It's very sort
(34:03):
of gruesive and grim. Uh this is ironic as even
the book is like, hey, not actually a ghost camel,
probably just a real camel. But the book also started
my collection of locally published ghost stories. Whenever I travel
someplace new, I get a book on that area's ghost stories.
It's a great and unique way to revisit the places
I've been. I love that story, I love that that
(34:24):
that approach. It's a good that's a girl, that's good souvenirs.
Our next email is from our listener, Danielle. She says
I've just listened to your podcast about the Red Ghost
of Arizona and found it interesting when you were speculating
what would happen if camels became a pest on the
same scale of rabbits in Australia. In fact, camels are
also a pest here in Australia, having been introduced originally
(34:46):
for exploration missions into the central deserts by explorers like
Burke and Wills. Thousands of camels were introduced, but once
automobiles became more common, the camels were just loosed into
the outback. They thrived far better here than in the States,
and a survey in two thousand eight showed we had
about one million feral camels roaming central and Western Australia.
I had no idea that's so cool. I mean, it's
(35:06):
not necessarily cool, but it's a cool fact. I don't
think that's actually cool. It's a cool fact to know,
she says. In fact, there were more wild camels in
Australia than in the regions from whence they originally came,
as they are predominantly domesticated in the Africa, Africa, Indo
China regions. As part of a plan to control the
population of feral camels. There's now an industry of trading
camels and camel products, including meat, which I have to
(35:27):
imagine has a very strong flavor. Two places such as
Saudi Arabia, where camels are part of the culture, camel
racing is a thing I would be really interested to
see one day. That is also very cool. We had
a listener, and I'm sorry that I didn't make a
note of it because I'm just remembering it now on
Facebook mentioned that I think it was that she thought
that she had read somewhere that they had um gelded
(35:49):
the camels that had come over, and I could never
find anything to corroborate that in my research, but I
suspected something like that might have also been the case,
since they did not thrive, even though the vironment seems
pretty ideal for them. So uh, it would certainly make
sense for a number of reasons. I mean, I just
think about the smell, but to be sort of biologically
(36:11):
gross about it. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at our new ISSH email address.
We're still here. Everything is staying more or less the same,
emails changing. It's gonna be history. Podcasts and at how
stuff works dot com. You can also still connect with
us at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, on Twitter,
at misston history, at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
(36:32):
and at pinterest dot com slash missed in history. If
you would like to learn more about pandas who doesn't,
you can go to housto works dot com and type
in the word pandas in the search bar and you'll
get a few different articles, including why don't pandas hibernate?
And why is the birthrate solo for giant Panda's which
Tracy wrote it is a very long time ago, and
it kind of talks about how in captivity it's been
(36:53):
very tricky. They're more successful on their own out in
the wild, and why those things are the case, uh,
and why it's a little bit difficult to uh, to
keep panda going in in captive situations. You can also
visit us on our own website, which is missed in
history dot com, and you can study almost anything you
like on our parent website, which is how staff works
(37:13):
dot com and how could you do? For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff
works dot com
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