So some pandas were born.
Three, actually – a whole triplet litter of Chinese pandas – born behind bars.
Right when we think their kind’s dying, they beat the odds.
’cause the truth is, they pretty much are all dying. Or trying to.
I don’t mean to be a downer. The only thing cooler than pandas would be if one of them could actually talk like Jack Black. Or eat like him so that they’d stop getting dead. Like… I love them in that whole “flip past NatGeo and say ‘awww’ halfheartedly before changing the channel” sort of way. So, although I’ve never met one, per se, they seem cute and totally not worth killing. That might seem obvious, given my dietary tendencies. But given those same tendencies and the fact that I do like them, this question I’ve got bouncing round in my brain bucket may not seem so predictable:
Should we keep spending money on making them survive for survival’s sake?
Why are we humans doing that?
Sure, I totally revere these furry little creatures as much as the next armchair activist.
But the problem is that they won’t meet their jailers half-way on saving themselves. Bamboo’s got low bam-bang for the bam-buck energy-wise, the other stuff they won’t eat most of, and they won’t even fork eachother. I’m torn because on the one hand, I totally believe in helping and nourishing other sentient creatures (that don’t have eight legs #nope). Someone might make the same argument I do about my food and say – “what if it were a dog?” Yes, dogs are helpless, often. But the difference is that even though my shih-tzu and Ling Ling hail from the same country, the former bish came to me as a rescue and an adorably runty result end-product of years of domestication. That’s genetically learned helplessness that’s gone from ferocity on four legs that’d travel with brethren in vicious packs – to a shaggy midget footstool that’s diminutive but Napoleonically so in their capacity to Trojan horse our hearts with their whisking little saunter and gaze of adoration.
It’s like rendering a furry permanent infancy into one companion that more wild animals only fleetingly can convey, lest they die in the jaws of something mightier. Doesn’t make the pandas any less spesh, but they were born wild and the logic should ideally be non-interference until they wander up to our campfires with a name tag that says “HI, I AM: food, pleeez”, like the first wolf-hounds did.
When it comes to a species who seems to be committing Darwinian suicide, is it right to be working so hard to keep ‘em going? I mean, they basically want to be taken off life support if the moms are so exhausted that they can’t even care for their young after childbirth. And good for her! Bish didn’t wanna have kids and now you inseminate her with rape babies after machine assault? What the fuzz? What the tri-furry fuzz even? I’m not taking care of those bastards if it’s me, either. I’m going back to sleep until I can finally die. And I (still in panda character, here) hope they die too so that they don’t have to carry on this lugubrious legacy our lives are. If you want someone to raise them, call their father, whoever he is.
Don’t bother me. Talk to the pa[w].
That said, not all interference is bad.
If it’s without a scientific aim and if we’re not forcing them to breed or feed, I get it.
Like, just to be nice? Offer a metaphorical life raft version that that dude literally did when he saved a grizzly from drowning? Right. I phux with that. But screw the zoos and tests and artificial sexytime and all that. Instead, I vote for setting them up in a nice little Four Seasons meets Wanderlust style commune somewhere overseas – where all we are are silent butlers who host mixers, spike the punch with spanish fly, and let them enjoy what life they’ve got being an animal – not some furry cog in a machine. ‘cause I wouldn’t want dinner or a dicking if that’s all my unique life mission amounted to, either.
So let’s grab these three newborn little guys and make them the triplet kings of panda paradise where their only directive’s living out the remaining days of their golden era doing what animals should:
living for the moment.
