Face to face encounters are rare in giant panda society. But with such extensive overlap between home ranges, pandas are bound to meet up occasionally with one another. Most encounters are male-male or male-female encounters. The only female-female associations are between a mother and her infant daughter where the relationship is one of provision and protection on the part of the mother and dependence on the part of the daughter. In male-female encounters, the subject is sex and the outcome is courtship and mating. In male-male meetings the 'conversation' is not about territorial boundaries, it is purely about rank, about who is likely to take precedence for a female's favours. The outcome of meetings between males is only very rarely aggressive because that is risky and wasteful. More usually, it is mutual agreement about which of the two has a higher rank and therefore who should give way to whom. Older, bigger males with more experience command higher status but in time they will slip down the hierarchical ladder as age takes its toll.
In mammals short-distance calls focus attention on the caller, who then conveys further information by means of facial expressions, postures and movements. The giant panda's face does not lend itself to subtle expressions and its dense bamboo environment means that body posturing is not as useful as it could be. Detailed information on emotional state is conveyed through the complex combination of calls and intermediate sounds a panda makes during an encounter. Judging by the complexity of the calls - combinations of sounds such as moan-growls and roar-squeals, the merging of one call into another to produce a continuous signal, and calling at different intensities
–a giant panda experiences rapid shifts in emotions. For example, during an): one encounter, it can shift through apprehension, defensive threat and offensive threat. Pandas are particularly vocal carnivores when interacting, and that their need to communicate emotional and physical information is made all the more acute by the fact that meetings are infrequent.Vocalizations are important in giant panda society but they are not the panda's everyday language. Routine news broadcasts are made by leaving scented messages and visual posters at traditional spots. These are the answer phones of giant panda society and without them chaos would ensue. Odours applied to solid objects persist and convey messages long after the communicator has left the site. They are an especially important means of communication for solitary species which seldom meet to exchange visual and vocal signals. Scent enables several pandas to exchange information without having to congregate, a facility of immense importance for a species that needs to space out its members. Scent is so important for social integration that animals will leave tell-tale trails which give away their whereabouts to their predators, and some carnivores, in turn, sacrifice part of the surprise element in hunting because of their own distinctive smells. The response of an individual receiving a message depends on its sex its status in society, its reproductive condition and also its previous contacts with the depositor.