“They believed they were hunting a bear that was a combination of a polar bear and a black bear that was going to be “the most aggressive animal in the world.”
That is really what they thought a panda would be. And that I mean that goes to tell you how little we understood about pandas at that time. And, of course, what they found is something quite different.
They do kill the panda. They bring it back to the Field Museum. But there are unintended consequences of this journey. And what we see is that all of these hunting explorations, all of these big game hunters all of the sudden have the means to find the panda now thanks to the Roosevelt expedition. And not only that, but you also have other explorers who now, because they know where the panda is, go into the woods to steal cubs for American zoos.
The Roosevelts are aghast at what has happened. They talk about this in many letters, in many journal entries. It this is a real source of heartbreak for them. And it's because of this that they decide to fight for changes in wildlife conservation. It's a whole change in philosophy because they go from being scientists — like many scientists were at the time — who believed that the only way to save endangered animals was to document them. Nature had made its choice. Humans had very little control and so the best thing to do was to go out there and hunt as many as you could so that way they could be studied.
This seems crazy. We can't even imagine such a thing today. But at the time this was the thinking. And it's really this expedition that changes that thinking because what you have is Kermit Roosevelt, who ends up becoming president of the Audubon Society and has an important place in the New York society, and he works to change how protections are made for the panda and he does quite a bit of diplomacy with Chinese officials and the panda ends up being the first endangered animal that gets these protections.
Today we can't think of the panda without thinking of it as being emblematic of animals and conservation. That wouldn't have happened without the Roosevelts.