I was having dinner last weekend at a friend’s place and, being seniors, our conversation turned to what we would do after May. Government and finance came up, but one person declared she would be volunteering to conserve giant pandas in China for six months.

Pandas? I’m pretty sure pandas are a huge cosmic joke. I think the whatever high on top of the thing wanted to see how long it would take for a useless animal to become extinct.

Recently the BBC reported on the naming ceremony for a bumper crop of panda cubs at Wolong Nature Reserve, China. They are, I admit, unbelievably cute.

But they are totally useless. They only eat one type of bamboo and they have to eat about thirty pounds of the stuff every day just to stay alive.

What if something came to hunt it? Let’s go through its thought process…

“Damn. That’s a big scary thing coming toward me. And I’m full of juicy meat. And I can’t really run. Yeh, and I can’t hide. I’m freakin’ black and white, and everything around me is green and brown. Maybe if there were like a group of black and white rocks nearby…”

Let’s include a set of black and white, panda-sized rocks.

“Would you look at that! Black and white rocks. But they’re 500 feet away. The bamboo is here…”

He looks at the bamboo, then the rocks, then the bamboo again.

“If I leave, and my digestive tract becomes anything less than completely full, I’ll die anyway — and I’ll die hungry. Better just sit here and die content. I just wish my body had been strong enough to have sex so I could have left a cub behind. What the hell. We stopped evolving ’cause those two-legged things look after us anyway…”

That’s right, they aren’t even good at reproducing. The spirit is very willing, but the flesh is weak. People have even (unsuccessfully) tried giving male pandas Viagra. But sex takes too long and they’ll probably die because they will have stopped eating. That’s why 18 cubs was such a bumper harvest.

My point is, I see no reason why such a useless, ill-adapted animal should receive our intervention with Viagra to preserve it when it has no interest in continuing its own line.

So, Penn students who want to help animals, help those that:

a) are of genuine use to the world (exceptions can be made here), but far more importantly,

b) actually want to live.

Tags: helping useless animals, pandas

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