Well, according to this Twitter entry, they are – so Chinese zoo workers are trying to get them to exercise more. The only confirmation of this that I have had so far is this, which is a year old.
I know that even writing this may violate an unstated taboo, but at some point we may have to ask if giant pandas actually want to avoid extinction. It’s like they keep coming up with ways to provoke natural selection into deselecting them; if they looked like opossums – or even squirrels, which aren’t actually ugly-looking – the panda would have long since left the Circle of Life. So… are we just encouraging more and more self-destructive evolutionary behaviors with our misguided altruism? Have we trapped ourselves in a codependent relationship with a bamboo-chewing species of lazy nihilists? Are we enablers?
Moe Lane
PS: That being said, Suicidal Pandas would be a good name for a band.