THAILAND — Once upon a time, zookeepers couldn’t convince their giant pandas to fuck, let alone get them to reproduce successfully. But Chinese experts herald an ongoing giant panda baby boom as the dawn of a new era filled with cuddly baby panda cuteness. What happened to change things?Some say it was the porn.

“It works,” insists Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, whose team showed virgin giant pandas DVDs featuring less innocent pandas getting down and dirty with one another.

Beloved throughout the globe, giant pandas are infamously poor breeders while in captivity. Researchers have wracked their brains for decades to find ways to simulate the kinds of environments and conditions that romantic minded giant pandas prefer when making fertile love. Part of the problem stems from the fact that girl pandas just aren’t that interested in sex, experiencing desire for a mere 48 hours per year. Further complicating things is the male panda’s natural tendency to fight one another for the right to cash in on those 48 hours. With no competition to help them blow off steam, males have often taken their frustration out on their intended mates.

JoGayle Howard, an animal reproduction specialist for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC explains that “At first people thought that you just put two animals together and they would figure it out. But it didn’t turn out that way.” Instead, the captive animals, devoid of role models, “just freaked out and fought,” according to Howard.

Zhang’s team has had the greatest success to date in China, where 2006 was the most productive year on record for giant panda births within their native country. He credits his unique ability to induce a desire to make more panda babies not to any one technique, but to an accumulation of research on biology, nutrition, and genetics, coupled with efforts to “imitate nature better.”

Thanks to Zhang’s efforts, 31 cubs were born in 2006 from a combination of natural breeding and artificial insemination, with 28 of those surviving and 14 conceived the old fashioned way. The previous year had seen a mere 12 births, which had been a boost from nine during 2000.

Unfortunately, this success rate has not been replicated outside of China; something that Prasertsak Buntragulpoontawee hopes to change this month, when Chuang Chuang and his partner Lin Hui will be encouraged to take the plunge in Thailand. Prasertsak plans to employ porn in the hopes that it will inspire his fuzzy couple in much the same way that “chimpanzees seeing people smoke” can result in chimps doing likewise.

“It’s the sounds of breeding that simulate them,” Zhang hypothesizes. “Pandas are just like human beings. They understand everything.” Among the things that giant pandas apparently understand is that merely being put in a room with a strange adult of the opposite sex is not necessarily a love connection. “In the wild, they have their own choices when mating. But when we breed them in captivity, it’s like taking two human beings and forcing them to mate.”

If all goes well, the panda-see/panda-do videos will help raise the captive breeding population to 300, something the Smithsonian Institution says is the current world goal. Right now, the numbers are quickly moving toward 220, making inbreeding and a more diverse genetic pool a reality that will ultimately make it possible to reintroduce more of the rare animals to the real world, where somewhere between 1,600 and 3,000 giant pandas await.