It’s a lonely cause to advocate, to be sure.
Congratulations on your new panda cub, Washington! You’re prolonging the existence of a hopeless and wasteful species the world should’ve given up on long ago.
I understand the impulse. Some people find them cute. Pandas don’t have much of a habitat left in the wild, thanks to heedless human development. And zoos imagine they’re doing the right thing, pulling in some extra visitors while helping conservation efforts.
But the first test of a species’ worthiness for conservation should be some instinct for self-preservation. And pandas fail objectively.
And yet I’ve seen this call before. As I’ve asked in the past: can we really say that pandas WANT to live? I’m not convinced that they do.
Via Newser.
Moe Lane
PS: For the record: my wife feels that I am anthropomorphizing like all get-out, here. Which is… fair.
A species to lazy to procreate… yeah. Let’s just stuff all the rest of them and put them in the Natural History Museums where they apparently want to be.
Take for example, the American Alligator (Alligator Mississippiensis): It was hunted almost to extinction. Then when the government put a stop to that in 1967, they came roaring back and was taken off the endangered species list in 1987. They wanted to live. They still have a place in the world.
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I feel bad for the Panda, but I totally agree with you. They have to show actual Panda Porn to the Pandas in order to get them to mate. That’s really degrading to no end.
There’s an angle here .. get *government* money out of keeping the giant panda around, it will soak up plenty of other, generally *liberal* money .. which will make life easier.
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Mew
But what happens if pandas turnout to like the whales of Star Trek IV? Are we going to have to listen to Spock’s inelegant attempts at cursing?
We might be ignoring something, here.
It might just be me, but Pandas look like they should be good eating. They, like cows, are big, fat, stupid herbivores. They are on my list of “Animals I’d like to eat before I die”. We just need to find a way around the whole endangered list problem (a stupid, “liberals don’t understand ecology” concept, by the way).
We should keep them around if Panda Express could actually secure enough delicious panda meat to serve panda entrees. Use IVF to overcome the inherent “Pandas don’t care about reproduction” problem.
Mmmmmm….panda.