Pandas. Aren't they sweet? Big adorable cuddly things without libido or carnivorous tendencies likely to threaten young children. And that's the problem for me.
Pandas are one of the WWF’s most trumpeted endangered species, in fact symbolic of the whole cause. Harmed by China's cheerful industrialisation and playful use of bamboo, their habitat is being eroded and they become endangered. But that’s not why they’re dying out.
As a species they have made some very bad decisions. It’s not their fault they live in China; it wasn’t China when they moved in. Pandas are bears, just like brown bears, grizzlies and polar bears. They should be proud (if shy), aggressive (when threatened), dominating apex species as adept at eating berries as they are flipping fish from a river.
Instead, this noble omnivore has chosen to reject a high protein diet in favour of bamboo - a substance so worthless that they have to eat vast quantities of it to get enough energy to even digest the stuff. It’s so inefficient that they actually excrete it in near mint-condition. It’s worse than grass and they don’t have the multiple stomachs of herbivores to deal with it. Bamboo gives them just enough motivation to scratch themselves and look puzzled when you mention sex.
My point is that the panda has chosen to become extinct. There simply is no future for them. They have naturally deselected themselves and should be allowed to die out with far less attention and not be forced into the awkward mating scenarios with predictably embarrassing results we see on television. We don’t know why pandas gave up on good dieting and procreation; maybe they don’t like their neighbours, perhaps they know there’s a better afterlife. Whichever it is, we should just let them go quietly into the night.
If you wanted to help them I suppose you could encourage them to eat bacon sandwiches (the #1 vegetarian habit breaker), or whatever the local equivalent is, snapping turtle burgers for instance. Then you might get a creature that could attend the annual bear pride conference and doze off in their room. They might even want to get it up occasionally and re-enter the evolutionary race. At present they’ve been overtaken by sloths.
I’m not talking about culling them or even encouraging their decline, but they’re being forced to survive and I find that cruel. I guess the WWF can’t let go now – that would be the ultimate failure, to lose your logo and have to rebrand with something else. They should go for a snail or reptile and ditch this ridiculous sentimentality about animals that make good plush toys.
It's rare that I become incensed about an endangered species, but this one's been brewing for a while now. I can’t even really explain it. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of pandas: Sue was okay on the Sooty Show and I have a fondness for fighting with Panda in Tekken 3 (Fatal Wind… fantastic move), but really... you can’t imagine them in the other WWF can you? Get into red pandas instead, they’re brilliant!
