Horses Latest Threat To Panda Habitat

There are just 1,600 pandas living in the wild and they seem to be facing a new threat from horses.

Chinese farmers in Sichuan Province seeking a safe investment have been buying an increasing number of horses and then allowing them to feed in protected areas belonging to the Panda according to the latest research. The horses end up consuming all the bamboo the pandas rely on for food.

“It didn’t take particular panda expertise to know that something was amiss when we’d come upon horse-affected bamboo patches. They were in the middle of nowhere and it looked like someone had been in there with a lawn mower.” Vanessa Hull, a doctoral student at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, said

Threatened pandas

Giant pandas are extremely fussy about both their food and habitat and require forest area that is secluded with plenty of bamboo which they exclusively eat.

Whilst it is known that deforestation has long threatened the panda, Hulls and her colleagues were surprised to find that bamboo was increasingly disappearing from protected areas.

The researchers spoke with many of the areas local farmers and found they were of the opinion that horses were a very good investment. Horses are not allowed to graze in cattle areas so many of the farmers would simply set them free in the Panda reserve and then round them up when cash was needed. In the decade spanning 1998 to 208 the number of horses in the area rose from 25 to 350.

Overlapping needs

The horses live in as many as 30 herds and Ms Hull and her colleagues found four of them and fitted a single horse in each with a GPS collar. The findings were a little surprising with the range of the horses overlapping with that of the panda with both animals drawn to the same bamboo patches. Whilst a single panda eats the same amount of bamboo as a single horse, a herd of 20 horses will clean out the patch leaving precious little for the pandas which come after.

According to scientist Jianguo Liu lifestock is the single biggest threat to most of the world’s biodiversity. They

“They make up 20 percent of all of the Earth’s land mammals and therefore monopolize key resources needed to maintain the Earth’s fragile ecosystems.” Mr. Liu said.

The study’s results however have had an immediate impact on panda conservation. After the results were presented to officials of Wolong Nature Reserve, horses were immediately banned.