All entries for Thursday 26 January 2006

Pandas should die

Awww look at the cuddly panda. But I’m being serious here. Pandas suck. They suck at the easiest thing, the one thing that every other species currently existing on earth has managed: surviving. Believe it or not, someone conducted a panda census, and besides the fact that 30% registered themselves as Jedi, the census showed that there were less than 1,000 giant pandas in existence. I say: let them die.

140 of these giant pandas live here – at the Wolong Nature Preserve. It’s a 500,000 square acre piece of land in China’s Sichuan Province, and 10% of the world’s pandas are cared for under the watchful eye of Dr Zhang Hemin. Dr Hemin and his team spend their entire time trying to get the pandas to breed: it’s a multi million dollar operation, but to what end?

The Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), has issues in three vital areas of survival: eating, reproducing and caring for young.

Before you get all “man are destroying the panda’s habitat”, think again. Pandas are struggling to survive because they have a stupid diet: unlike every other animal on this planet, the Panda will eat only bamboo shoots and leaves. Naturally if you just eat one thing you’re gonna run out soon enough. On top of that, bamboo has the nutritional value of kitchen roll. If humans were dumb enough to eat only dish clothes we’d be on the verge on extinction. And you can bet there wouldn’t be any pandas running special breeding programmes for us.

Colby Loucks, a conservations scientist with the WWF, says there’s enough bamboo rich land for pandas, but it’s all broken up. "Imagine a broken cookie," he says. "Though there are several large protected chunks of land, there are also lots of small and isolated crumbs of habitat around the edges."

Loucks wants special conservation areas set up to join these fragmented pieces of land. Way too much effort for an animal that’s not going to meet its end of the bargain.

Believe it or not, Pandas are carnivores. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, an animal so stupid, it doesn’t realise it can eat meat, and so the giant panda spends hours of its day chewing on bamboos, extracting a mere 20% of the nutrients from it. Why spend all this time creating special zones for pandas when they should just learn to vary their diet like the rest of us?

However, the hard part of Dr Zhang Hemin’s work isn’t feeding the pandas, its getting them to breed. And this is where the panda really shows how pathetic it is. OK, we all know survival ain’t easy – you gotta be tough to make it in this world, and every species on the planet has done so through adaptation to its environment, optimising its reproductive capacity.

Not so the giant panda. According to an article on National Geographic, male pandas “either show a serious lack of interest or are incompatible with the females and become aggressive.” Great job guys. Really playing for the team there. The females are just as bad, and ovulate for an incredibly lame 3 days in a year.

C’mon let’s face it people – these animals don’t want to survive.

Unfortunately and against all mathematical odds, some do make the effort and shag on the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, or get artificially inseminated by those pesky scientists at the Wolong Nature Preserve.

But because of their piss poor diet, the offspring are massively malnutritioned at birth and come out looking like this – sorry, pink rags a mere 1/1000th of the size of their parents. Dr Zhang Hemin and his team have to survey the new mothers 24hours a day just to make sure they don’t roll over and squash their kids.

And get this – the parents are so lazy/stupid, the scientists are able to swap their offspring around if a mother rejects her child (yes, they do that too.) According to David Wildt, head of reproductive sciences at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, "The mother doesn't even wake up—it's amazing."

Unbelievable. These animals can’t be arsed to mate, and when they do, they either sit on or ignore their offspring! Why are we spending millions of dollars keeping these useless balls of fur alive when they can’t be bothered to do it themselves?

Of course, we have to weigh up the other worrying consequences of loosing pandas from this earth – what will CBBC Newsround report on once they've gone? What will Cadburys-Schweppes name their brand of shandys?

I’m not proclaiming a mass cull, but I don’t see why we’re helping them. Let them stumble pathetically along life’s actually-quite-easy track, and when they trip up, let them hit the dust. When we stop paying them attention, then they’ll grow up and start acting like a species.

: 26 Jan 2006 20:49 |  Tags: Me Trying To Be Funny |  Comments (14) |  Close comments |  Report a problem