Multi-millionaire donor suggests fixing & finishing the facilities the San Francisco Zoo already has, instead of spending megabucks to import giant pandas while the animals who are there now suffer.
SAN FRANCISCO, California––Back when newspapers were the major medium of mass communication, a staple of low comedy was the riddle, “What’s black-and-white and red (read) all over?”
These days the answer might be not “The newspaper,” but rather, “Zoo books after committing more than a million bucks a year to leasing a giant panda from China, and then spending more millions on panda facilities before taking delivery.”
DC zoo has new pandas
There is no shortage of evidence that exhibiting giant pandas can markedly boost zoo attendance. Still a novelty to zoo-goers, 53 years after China made the first panda loan to the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., a pair of giant pandas and their baby, exhibited at the National Zoo for 10 years, reportedly drew 250,000 visitors in the last six weeks before they were flown back to China in October 2023.
Now packing the National Zoo, despite harsh winter weather, are a new giant panda pair, on exhibit since January 24, 2025.
The city-owned San Francisco Zoo during the summer of 1984 exhibited two giant pandas for three months, attracting a season record 409,000 visitors and annual record attendance of 1.4 million.
$25 million up front
Current San Francisco Zoo director Tanya Peterson projects that a giant panda exhibit now in planning might draw attendance of 1.2 million, enough to pull the 95-year-old zoo out of decades of economic doldrums.
But the scheme would cost $25 million up front, and as much as $70 million over the planned duration of the panda loan.
Real estate developer John McNellis, identified by Sooji Nam of CBS San Francisco as a top donor to the San Francisco Zoo for 20 years, is among those not buying it, with personal net worth of $9.5 million and a long history of knowing how to make money behind him.
The evidence that giant panda exhibition is a giant economic success in the long run is at best inconsistent.
Giant panda: eats shoots & leaves
In November 2024 the Ahtari Zoo in Ahtari, Finland sent two giant pandas back to China, seven years into a 15-year loan and after having invested $8 million to build their habitat, because the zoo could no longer afford the $1.5 million per year to keep them.
In 2020 the Calgary Zoo sent two giant pandas back to China only two years into what was supposed to have been a five-year loan.
In 2018, the first year the Calgary Zoo hosted the giant pandas, they attracted 1.5 million people, slightly more than the two-week annual Calgary Stampede, which itself enjoyed record attendance. But interest in the giant pandas soon fell off.
Even before COVID-19 hit, it was clear that giant pandas were not to be confused with cash cows.
“Any number of exhibits are empty”
“Until we have a new administration at the zoo, we are going to withhold contributions,” McNellis told Nam on February 1, 2025.
Summarized Nam, “Over the years, McNellis said, the zoo has become even more run down and is in desperate need of refurbishment. When he found out that the zoo got the green light to fund a $25 million panda project, he was disappointed by the zoo’s direction.”
“Any number of exhibits are empty,” complained McNellis. “Any number of future exhibits are promised, and have been promised for years, but there are fewer animals there now than there used to be.”
Mayor who wanted pandas is out
Recalled Nam, “Bringing the giant pandas to the San Francisco Zoo was one of former mayor London Breed’s passion projects,” but Breed recently left office.
New mayor Daniel Lurie, inaugurated in January 2025, is not committed to investing city money in a panda loan.
The leading giant panda loan booster, apart from Tanya Peterson, now appears to be former San Francisco city administrator Bill Lee.
“China wants to, I would say, export these pandas to learn how to conserve them. They are an endangered species,” Lee told Nam.
Giant pandas are no longer endangered
But the giant panda conservation center in Chengdu, China, opened in 1987, has bred giant pandas so successfully that they are in fact no longer listed as “endangered” or even “threatened” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Giant pandas are still listed as “vulnerable,” but there are now nearly 2,000 giant pandas in the wild, thanks to Chinese efforts to restore bamboo forests, and as many as 600 giant pandas in captivity, many of them farmed out to zoos outside of China as a lucrative export.
The city of San Francisco subsidizes the San Francisco Zoological Society with about $4 million a year to keep the zoo open, according to Lee.
“The city has basically been starving the zoo”
Countered McNellis, to Nam, “The city has basically been starving the zoo for the last 20 years. The zoo administration is in a tough position. They don’t have enough money to absolutely run the zoo as it should be.”
Money “Needs to be spent on sidewalks, buildings, bring up the landscaping and all the overgrown trees. The poor zoo looks shabby, frankly,” McNellis told Nam, and that has actually been true for more than 50 years.
“Bringing in pandas today to our zoo would be exhibiting the Mona Lisa in an old, cracked, leaking barn,” McNellis alleged.
“Leaping Lemur Cafe” closed
Noted Nam, “The Leaping Lemur Café on site was shut down in January 2025 after reports of rodent infestation.
“Last October, the zoo came under fire after an audit report compiled by the San Francisco Animal Control & Welfare Commission called the facility outdated and unsafe for animals and visitors. They also added that with the exhibits nearing 94 years old, it would be unethical to move forward with the panda project until the facilities are improved.
“There are a lot of infrastructure issues,” Lee conceded, “but that really has not a lot to do with pandas. I believe with the pandas coming, there will be more funding they can spread out to all the parts of the zoo,” Lee hoped.
The Tobin report
The San Francisco Animal Control & Welfare Commission report was authored chiefly by Jane Tobin, who is both member of the San Francisco Commission of Animal Control & Welfare and a zoo advisor.
Tobin told media after releasing the report that she produced it prompted by an April 2024 San Francisco Chronicle article detailing concerns about animal welfare and employee safety, voiced to Chronicle reporters by zoo staff.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors responded to the Tobin report by voting to request a financial and management audit of the zoo, last done in 1999.
But San Francisco Zoological Society board chair Melinda Dunn complained that the Chronicle coverage of the report had harmed fundraising.
Tanya Peterson wrote to city attorney David Chiu and Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin demanding that the Tobin report be retracted.
SF Zoo Watch is harsher critic
If Dunn and Peterson thought San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the zoo has been harsh over the past year, though, they must not have read a critique by SF Zoo Watch founder Justin Barker, published on September 26, 2024 by the rival SF Standard.
Tanya Peterson, “a lawyer with little experience with animals or nonprofits, took the helm as interim director after the 2008 tragedy when a tiger named Tatiana escaped her enclosure, killing a teenager before being gunned down by police,” Barker began.
“Since then, Peterson, earning a staggering $358,000 annually — even more than the mayor herself — has remained in control,” even though “no fewer than 97% of the zoo’s union members twice cast a vote of no-confidence in Peterson,” Barker charged.
“Gorillas wade through flooded moats”
“According to interviews with former and current zoo employees, Joint Zoo Commission meetings, and a draft report from the City Animal Welfare Commission,” Barker wrote, “the San Francisco Zoo is crumbling. Many of the animals are confined to century-old concrete pits. Gorillas wade through flooded moats during storms; koalas sit cramped indoors because their outdoor space is too small; and orangutans live on sad 10-by-10-foot islands surrounded by moats.
“François’ langurs live in chain-link cages that are so small, the animals can’t properly swing around the enclosure. The penguins are dosed with fungicide to survive their shallow pool. Chimpanzees? They’re within grabbing distance of visitors.
“Staff are stuck working in dilapidated trailers, battling leadership just to get basic safety measures. Many of the staff have left or were pushed out. The zoo has experienced numerous unsafe incidents, including animal escapes, thefts, and negligent deaths,” Barker recounted.
Media coverage in the ANIMALS 24-7 files confirms most of the allegations.
Pandas “are the magic solution”
“Imagine a zoo director attempting to house agile, expert-climbing predators in an open-top grotto,” Barker went on.
“First, according to a well-placed former employee, she [Peterson] attempted to put a jaguar in the 90-year-old Grotto B, then a snow leopard. Now she wants to put giant pandas in that same space — where their night quarters will be within sight and smell of African lions. What could go wrong?
“But, hey, pandas! They’re the magic solution to all of the zoo’s problems!”
For approximately the same estimated cost of the panda loan, Barker argued, the San Francisco Zoo could emulate the Oakland Zoo, on the far side of San Francisco Bay, which “spent that same sum of money on the California Trail, doubling the zoo’s footprint and creating naturalistic habitats for wolves and grizzlies. That zoo,” Barker said, “is actively rehabilitating wildlife — 52 condors and 27 mountain lions to date — and is helping to reintroduce bison to Blackfeet tribal lands.
San Francisco Zoo & Clearwater Marine Aquarium work from the same playbook
“Under Peterson,” Barker charged, “the San Francisco Zoo has consistently failed to complete key infrastructure projects, with a Madagascar exhibit unfinished after six years and an Andean condor project never even started, leaving the raptors stuck in old feline cages.
“A tree-dwelling jaguar languishes in a 30-by-40-foot enclosure with no trees,” Barker alleged, “while the zoo operates without a master plan — or even a one-year strategy — focusing instead on Band-Aid fixes and headline-grabbing gimmicks.”
ANIMALS 24-7 is reminded of the ongoing effort by the financially struggling Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, Florida, to win a permit to import five bottlenose dolphins from the Attica Zoological Park in Athens, Greece.
(See Will Clearwater Marine Aquarium call on Trump to allow dolphin imports?)
Sometimes the arrival of new animals rekindles interest in failing zoos and aquariums enough to keep them going, for a while.
But there is also the axiom that, “When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
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