The Case Against Pandas
Giant Panda (wikimedia)
Englishman tries to earn the ire of panda-lovers everywhere:
Conservationists should “pull the plug” on giant pandas and let them die out, according to BBC presenter and naturalist Chris Packham.
“Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham told Radio Times magazine.
The 48-year-old believes that money spent on conserving the panda would be better invested in other animals as the species is not strong enough to survive alone.
I think that’s probably true in some kind of narrow sense. And by the same token, one might argue that it’s wrong to expend funds on restoration of architectural landmarks when the funds might be better spent improving infrastructure in poor countries. But there isn’t actually a lump sum of charitability in the universe and not hard to understand why it’s easier to raise funds for preservation of cute animals than non-cute animals. The question is whether panda-related endeavors generate a net surplus or a net deficit of funds for non-panda conservation activities. My understanding is that it’s a net positive, that programs for “flagship” famous animals help subsidize work on lesser-known species.
Still, on an individual basis I think the critique holds up. I own some stuffed pandas, I like to visit the pandas in the zoo, I used to have a panda-based Twitter icon, but personally I try to donate money to more high priority causes.
61 Responses to “The Case Against Pandas”
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September 24th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Stoopid pandas.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Definitely a net positive. Also the coolest expression in environmentalism – “Charismatic Megafauna.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna
September 24th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
The Pandas argue that we don’t need fucking Englishmen, actually. And that if you’ll take down the bars, we’ll see who become extinct.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ifqWe_r0LU
September 24th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
In case nobody noticed, the panda in that picture is actually played by the great Frank Gorshin.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
re “The 48-year-old believes that money spent on conserving the panda would be better invested in other animals as the species is not strong enough to survive alone.”
————-
I hear that Max Baucus is making a similar argument re Medicare patients.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
He’s assuming that it’s equally valuable to save every species.
I disagree. My life is qualitatively improved more by the continued non-extinction of the panda than of the spotted-toe crapworm of South Indonesia. If it were up to me, I’d happily sacrifice hundreds of those ugly, esoteric, ecologically irrelevant species to save the panda.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I appreciate the degree of difficulty in arguing against pandas… though a more audacious contrarian would have taken on puppies or kittens.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
At this current time, and subtracting out man-made changes to the pandas’ habits and ecosystems, how would one know whether or not they were an “evolutionary cul de sac”? Is there a guide to how species will develop in the future?
September 24th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
this guy needs to explain how they’re still around at all, given that they obviously made it on their own for a very long time before they were hunted to near extinction.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I’ve been pulling for the extinction of pandas for awhile now — I’m glad someone else is finally picking up on it.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Pender: that misses the point. The Panda is less ecologically relevant than many other less charismatic species. In some cases the spotted-toe crapworms (or whatever) are more integral to ecosystem function than the big fuzzy things.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
The Panda is a sensitive, intelligent, and kind-hearted creature. If it means sacrificing Michael Rubin and the rest of the AEI contingent on their upcoming China excursion, who could object to that?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Matt,
Seriously, please post a picture of you with the stuffed pandas. the internet has lacked this and only you can fix this omission. please, for the intertubes, you are our only hope!
September 24th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Who’s going to eat all the bamboo in my backyard?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Look, we’re living in the Anthropocene, right? We are fundamentally altering the ecology of this planet in so many ways that preserving a species that would otherwise be doomed to extinction if we had allowed the conditions of the Holocene to continue is just the least of it.
Since we are now living in a different geologic era, different precisely because of us, I submit that “being cute to humans” can become a survivability trait. The wild North African felix is an endangered species. Its genetically identical relative — the domesticated house cat — numbers in the billions and is found on every continent just because felix lives in symbiosis with humans (I’m not sure that at the moment there are any pet cats living in our South Pole observer stations, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn someone had brought their cat there). The auroch of ancient Europe is extinct; its relatives and descendants — our cattle — probably also number at least a billion. I’m sure everyone here could come up with more examples of a species that has flourished just because we wanted it to. Why should the panda be an exception to the rule?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
The Panda is less ecologically relevant than many other less charismatic species. In some cases the spotted-toe crapworms (or whatever) are more integral to ecosystem function than the big fuzzy things.
Yes, but to save the spotted-toe crapworm, you need to highlight to your supporters tangible examples of how their support pays off… which you can do by keeping Giant Pandas around. It’s not a zero-sum game: Giant Pandas promote more interest in wildlife conservation, which leads to more money for the more ecologically important spotted-toe crapworm.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Pablo Sandoval hates this post!
September 24th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Evolutionary dead-end? By being cute they’ve tied their continued survival to human love of cute animals. It’s a perfectly viable strategy. For all Packham knows, in 50 years we could be fitting the Panda with intelligence-enhancement devices. In 100 years the super-intelligent cyborg pandas could be kicking the crap out of their former masters. That’s when the king of the super-evolved pandas come out and take a dump on Packham’s grave while doing a little happy panda dance.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Several years ago I saw someone question if the Jerry Lewis telethon subtracted from money better spent elsewhere?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
For most species, it’s hard to determine ecological relevance. For Panda’s, it’s pretty easy to see that they have none. Spotted toe crapworm larva could be the primary consumer of the freshwater Hershius Squirtius algae.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The panda isn’t a sweet-natured beast. It’s slow and lazy and mean.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Doesn’t this post put the lie to your libertarian parking challenge from last week?
In that piece you criticized libertarians for in theory disliking all public transit funding but in theory only opposing specific instances. By the same token if you support pandas in theory but don’t in practice support them, then you leave yourself open to criticism.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Sarah Palin is applying for a license right now to kill the remaining panda population from the air via helicopter. She’s already in China, she may as well have some fun while she’s there. She can turn one into a sofa cover in time for her next in-home interview with Greta Van Sustern.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
So to maximize species preservation, we should keep the cute ones permanently on the brink of extinction.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
For those of you looking to donate to support a more cost-effective but still super-cute Panda, do what I did and donate to the Giant Panda’s distant cousin:
the Red Panda (link: National Zoo).
See? Isn’t that 10 times the cuteness per pound? Bonus trivia: the Red Panda is very technologically savvy — in its native land in the Himalayas, the Red Panda is called the Firefox.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Royce:
The pandas’ strategy will be successful if humans who favor panda preservation are more successful at reproducing than humans who favor panda extinction. It seems like the pandas are off to a good start, having settled in China.
What does Packham’s wife think of his plan?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
We could even do better than my last suggestion.
We could genetically engineer the ultimately cute animal and create a small population of them in captivity. Then, we threaten to kill them all if people don’t give money to save less cute species.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
One is certainly struck by the fact that, biologically speaking, Pandas just don’t seem to be trying very hard. They’re finicky eaters who’d rather starve than have one more meal of a type of bamboo they’ve grown bored with. They’re never in the mood to mate. And their babies come into the world about half-formed and nearly dead already.
They just don’t have their heads in the game. Sure is lucky for them they’re so cute. If they looked like possums…forget about it.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
This argument is routinely applied elsewhere with what appears to be a great deal of legitimacy. As an academic and mathematician, I don’t particularly care that coaches, athletic program directors, and sports infrastructure and promotion far outranks me in and my department in terms of budgetary considerations. But the fact of the matter is, successful teams attract extra funds and donors. They also seem to attract a better quality of student(surprising, I know, but there you have it.) Thus, overall, they end up being net contributors to the university.
Of course, unsuccessful teams don’t seem to have these salubrious effects . . . but opting out of the game altogether doesn’t seem to possible for most public universities.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
What does it mean to say that pandas are “lazy”? Is there something else they should be doing other than what pandas typically do?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Actually, the red panda and giant panda aren’t much more closely-related than any other pairs of mammals. The name comes from the days when people thought giant pandas might be closely related to raccoons. DNA testing reveals that giant pandas are, in fact, bears and not closely related to raccoons or red pandas.
I think the bamboo-eating threw them off, but part of the problem is that giant pandas eat bamboo but have a carnivore’s digestive system, which means they have to eat a LOT of bamboo to get their nutrition.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
“The panda isn’t a sweet-natured beast. It’s slow and lazy and mean.” (J. Davis)
Neocon propaganda. A few years ago, there was a documentary about Deborah Winger going on a panda search in China. Eventually, she found a panda and although frightened by the unexpected visit with a strange species – the panda not only accomodated Winger (no easy task), she (he) possessed a sagacity and wit quite reminiscent of The Buddha.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Re:
At this current time, and subtracting out man-made changes to the pandas’ habits and ecosystems, how would one know whether or not they were an “evolutionary cul de sac”?
And
this guy needs to explain how they’re still around at all, given that they obviously made it on their own for a very long time before they were hunted to near extinction.
Pandas are well adapted to living off bamboo. Bamboo is hard to digest and has low calorie content, but the advantage to living off it is that there’s no competition for the stuff except from other pandas and it can be found in environments with no predators.
This means that pandas breed (or rather, their offspring survive to adulthood) exactly at replacement rates and not a bit more, and when something infringes on their habitat – like, say, humans building houses or dams or rice fields – they don’t know what to do about it. It’s a lifestyle with few Plan Bs.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Ecologically irrelevant? Anyone who would say that aworm is “ecologically irrelevant” probably doesn’t know much about ecology.
“Lazy”? a different species, with a different digestive system, different heart rate, different lung capacity- basically a very dissimilar metabolism altogether, is “lazy”?
How energetic do you expect a species that eats a single, stationary food source should be? Humans very often overlook the fact that we are fairly energetic animals for our size. Just like we overlook our ability to withstand increasing temperature shifts, and our incredibility ability to remain locomotive for truly vast periods of time. We like to think that we’re “average” in everything but intelligence, and so we judge other animals very harshly when they can’t match up to our highly adapted specialities.
Hey, lets give it some coffee. If you enough to think Panda’s are “lazy” you’re probably don’t know why that would be a very bad idea.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
If a species is near extinction, then odds are it has already stopped playing a substantial role in the ecosystem. Spotted-toe crapworms are industrious little fuckers, but there’s only so much a few hundred of them can do, and it’s not clear what impact they have outside of the five or six square miles in which they live.
I get the ecology argument in the case of something like colony collapse syndrome, where a species as widespread as honeybees suddenly starts plummeting in population. That can cause ecological change. But going from fifty remaining honeybees to zero? No one but us would even notice.
Down with the crapworm; long live the panda!
September 24th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Pandas are cute, but I generally have difficuly getting too concerned about the extinction of one particular species or another per se. Rather, the issue to me is the fact that we are making broad swaths of the planet literally incapable of supporting life, and we do not even understand the ecological implications of lesser things that what we do. Not to be an alarmist, but the extinction of any species should be considered a warning sign that we should probably proceed with caution.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Re: If a species is near extinction, then odds are it has already stopped playing a substantial role in the ecosystem
Nonsense. Large animals and top predators are rare as a rule, and are easily vulnerable to extinction. Yet the play indubitably important roles in ecosystems. Many ecosystems have seen species go extinct and have been seriously changed by that.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
What’s funny is that we learned in school that it was wrong to call pandas “panda bears” as we all wanted to because pandas are not bears.
@15: Good points, but I think you could argue that there is more to a species than a sequence of DNA. While domestic cattle may be the genetic equivalent of the extinct Eurasian cattle and domestic cats may be the genetic equivalent of the wild African cat, there are certainly differences. Part of what makes a species unique is the set of behaviors that species exhibits and how it interacts with its habitat.
If people kept beavers as livestock in pens and the wild dam-building beavers that live in rivers became extinct, well our pathetic and ignorant domestic beavers would be a sorry substitute for the real thing.
Also, a species that is 100% dependant on humans for its survival would have a pretty tough time if suddenly humans were gone from the environment. Talk about an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Re Jeffrey at 21: “The panda isn’t a sweet-natured beast. It’s slow and lazy and mean. ”
———–
Hmmm. People say the same about me.
As others have noted, laziness is an grossly underrated trait. It is a survival trait developed in order to keep calorie expenditure down during periods of food shortages.
Or at least that’s what I tell my wife when she asks how that list of chores is coming.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I own some stuffed pandas
TMI!!!
Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac…
Who’s to say that the panda hasn’t evolved into a “cute” creature specifically to dupe humans like Matthew into saving them? That would be one of the best evonlutionary mtations of all time…
September 24th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Re Royce at 18: “Evolutionary dead-end? By being cute they’ve tied their continued survival to human love of cute animals. ”
———-
Hey, it’s working out for Megan Fox.
And I bet the Pandas can act better.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
It’s not as if Packham’s argument is going to have any impact on the Chinese, for whom panda conservation is now a national interest.
Tigers? Well, the nutcases who keep them in their yards and apartments in the US will be preserving the species long after they’re gone from India and Nepal, as it stands right now. And picking up on Rob Mac and Hector, twenty tigers in a sanctury in Kansas don’t make up for a 20-mile range of Nepali forest losing its roving tiger.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
It’s not just the headline species (giant panda, spotted owl, etc.) that benefit from these campaigns but also the unnamed (and maybe unknown to all but regional specialists) species that cohabit the particular ecosystem.
The campaigns to Save the {Insert Name Here} are simple and, hopefully, photogenic and they drag along behind them in the bamboo thickets or old growth timberlands the other peculiar grubs, plants, and critters that live there with them.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Anyone who uses the phrase “evolutionary cul-de-sac” doesn’t understand evolution. (Or cul-de-sacs, for that matter.) The value of the panda’s — and the crapworm’s — continued existence is enhanced by their charisma and ecological centrality, if any, but not dependent on it.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Also — anyone against the panda has clearly never heard my 2-year-old daughter describe our trip to the National Zoo last month. (Saw a mommy pan’a and a baby pan’a and a mommy pan’a eat a watermelon. And a elephant open a mouth get the water from a hose. Two elephants!) Talk about cute!
September 24th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
What, no Fight Club quotes yet?
“I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke.”
September 24th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
El Cid @ #30:
Apparently they spend way too much time noodling around on the internet. Maybe the best way for the WWF to gin up panda reproduction numbers would be to fund some pandapr0n websites.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
All the more reason to open up a Panda Kebab hut and wipe them out. There’s no way a bunch of cybernetically enhanced spotted-toe crapworms will destroy humanity.
Cute is the ecological niche of the incompetent.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Eliminating a large animal from an area can indeed send a lot of ecological effects down the food chain. My wife’s family, when she was a kid in the ’80s, moved into a rapidly-developing hilly area on the edge of development in Southern California. For a while people who left their pets outside would sometimes lose them to coyotes. After a while and some more development, the coyotes in the area eventually left. With the coyotes gone, the jackrabbit population exploded, and you can generally see about 20 of them in the cul-de-sac on any given night. The jackrabbits chew up gardens that people plant, and I’m sure their booming numbers have altered the survival rate of the plants in the nearby open space. This, in turn, affects the insects and worms, etc.
What’s funny is that we learned in school that it was wrong to call pandas “panda bears” as we all wanted to because pandas are not bears.
I remember that, too. Honestly, I think people were overthinking pandas’ taxonomy. “B-b-but it eats bamboo! And the coloring is weird! It has an odd pseudothumb! It must not really be a bear!” Look, it’s obviously a bear, just one that evolved a taste for bamboo, and the DNA proves this out. Its teeth and digestive system are still carnivorous. And the pseudothumb helps it eat the bamboo. And if you’re neither a predator nor prey, then you can be any damn color you want, especially one that helps them recognize their own kind.
“Koala bear” is still wrong, though. Those are marsupials, and they only vaguely resemble a bear anyway.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Stupid Pandas! What a dumb choice.
If only preserving their environment would help other species. Rats!
September 24th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Or they could get a few man vs. panda matches in the next Wrestlemania.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Diana Says:
September 24th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Look, we’re living in the Anthropocene, right? We are fundamentally altering the ecology of this planet in so many ways that preserving a species that would otherwise be doomed to extinction if we had allowed the conditions of the Holocene to continue is just the least of it.
Since we are now living in a different geologic era, different precisely because of us, I submit that “being cute to humans” can become a survivability trait. The wild North African felix is an endangered species. Its genetically identical relative — the domesticated house cat — numbers in the billions and is found on every continent just because felix lives in symbiosis with humans (I’m not sure that at the moment there are any pet cats living in our South Pole observer stations, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn someone had brought their cat there). The auroch of ancient Europe is extinct; its relatives and descendants — our cattle — probably also number at least a billion. I’m sure everyone here could come up with more examples of a species that has flourished just because we wanted it to. Why should the panda be an exception to the rule?
==========================================================
My favorite is the avocado. You have to remember in Darwinian terms, producing fruit (like an avocado) is the tree’s way of bribing animals to spread their seeds over the landscape. Animal eats the fruit, then walks away and poops out the seed somewhere else in a nice pile of fertilizer. Trees tend to evolve with companion target animal species attracted to their fruit.
So you have to ask yourself – what animal is big enough to swallow an avocado seed whole? Turns out, no living animal in the avocado’s native range in Central America can. Paleobiologists believe that the avocado’s companion animal species were apparently mastodons and other elephant like critters. These all went extinct in the New World around 10,000 years ago.
The avocado was doomed to extinction with its seeds falling to the ground and the seedlings dying in the shade of the parent tree.
But then people got the bright idea of inventing guacamole and started planting avocado trees all over the place. Now the avocado is a raving success.
Got this story and several similar ones from a really neat book titled “The Ghosts of Evolution”.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Don Williams Says:
September 24th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Re Royce at 18: “Evolutionary dead-end? By being cute they’ve tied their continued survival to human love of cute animals. ”
———-
Hey, it’s working out for Megan Fox.
And I bet the Pandas can act better.
============================================================
Yeah, but their boobs aren’t as big
September 24th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Maybe the best way for the WWF to gin up panda reproduction numbers would be to fund some pandapr0n websites.
You may have been joking, but what you suggested is actually going on: Porn Sparks Panda Baby Boom in China.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Re: Look, it’s obviously a bear, just one that evolved a taste for bamboo, and the DNA proves this out.
I don’t think so. It IS a bear, as the DNA evidence proves, but there’s nothing ‘obvious’ about it. Morphologically and behaviorally it’s quite different from other bears.
Though it’s true that the majority of a black bear’s diet in North America (and this is even more true, if I recall correctly, for the sloth bears of India and the sun bears of Malaysia) is in fact vegetarian, and it’s also true that pandas do occasionally eat small animals. Sun bears are weird looking beasts, btw- smaller than many human beings.
Re: Saw a mommy pan’a and a baby pan’a and a mommy pan’a eat a watermelon
That’s really cute. Oddly enough I was also at the National Zoo last month- I was on vacation in DC. I did see the “pan’as”, along with a whole bunch of families with kids, and they are in fact really cute creatures.
Re: Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac…
That’s probably true in a strictly biological sense- I doubt anything will evolve from pandas. But it’s also irrelevant from a value judgment point of view. Most highly specialized creatures, including humans, are also evolutionary dead ends. I don’t think human beings will evolve into anything (that’s to say, I suspect we will either destroy ourselves or last till the world ends). The evolutionary potential of a species is a piss-poor way to judge its importance to the ecosystem or to ourselves.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Re: Eliminating a large animal from an area can indeed send a lot of ecological effects down the food chain.
Adam Villani,
The elimination of wolves and mountain lions from the Northeast (and for that matter coyotes, though there’ coming back) is also a good example- the subsequent rise in the deer population has altered forest ecosystems and made it hard for many tree species to regenerate (I know a forestry grad student who’s studying that).
There are myriads of other examples, some of the best studied are in marine ecosystems. Some argue that the overfishing of pollock in the North Pacific has led to declines in seal populations, which lead killer whales to switch to eating otters instead, which causes an increase in the sea urchin population, which causes a decline in the kelp forests.
Elephants are critical to spreading the seeds of many rainforest trees in Africa, and those species will be on the road to extinction if the elephant populations drop too low (fortunately the forest elephant hasn’t yet suffered as much from deforestation and hunting as the savannah elephants).
September 24th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Campesino, Poor little pandas are cute. Megan Fox is kind of Hot in a way that gets less impressive every time you see her. You know how you sometimes meet a girl and she doesn’t impress you that much at first, but over time you start to notice how cute she is? Megan Fox is the inverse of that.
Hector, thats not how it works. The world will have to undergo changes. It’s temperature will increase and plummet. The composition of it’s atmosphere will change. We will evolve or we will cease to be. We can not make it the end of the world in our current state.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Re: We will evolve or we will cease to be. We can not make it the end of the world in our current state.
I’ll bet on ‘cease to be’, Soullite. Highly specialized organisms tend not to evolve very well.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
He is is right about how no one should spend any money on Panda’s. They are a lucrative business in their own right. The value of a single panda is in the millions. Plus they are boring as shit.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Am I missing something here,
…or did he just say, “We should reallocate resources away from pandas because they aren’t good at survival to free up resources to help other species which aren’t good at survival?”
September 28th, 2009 at 11:13 am
We owe it to the pandas to conserve them. And does it eventually boil down to money? So it’s not just about evolution now is it, but rather if it’s “worth” conserving them? Save the pandas. Here’s a cool video about the pandas: http://www.newsy.com/videos/adapt_or_die