Makes a lot of sense -- only they are sooo cute.
From Wildlife Extra News:
Chris Packham - It is time to let the Panda go?Chris actually makes a very good case for this. For the same amount that we are paying to get one panda pair to give birth to one cub, we could save millions of acres of Amazonian rainforest.
Part One - Can we afford Pandas?
I've been upsetting most peoples sentimentalities again recently by saying, loudly thanks to BBC Radio and the written media, that it time we found the courage to give up on Pandas. Let them go, wave goodbye, maybe have a party, or a wake, whatever, just stop wasting money trying to 'save' them from extinction. I know, a bit controversial to question conservation, the great invention of all the good folk who want to save everything from themselves, let alone spout such heresy about its most sacred icon. For those of you who are not aware of my maverick musings on this matter I'll precis them here.
An ex-carnivore bamboo muncher unfortunately ends up in the most populated place on earth. Its food predictably all dies with disastrous regularity and its digestive system is poorly adapted to its diet. It's slow to reproduce, tastes good, but in a blind strike of evolutionary luck it is plump, cute and cuddly. That is from an anthropological point of view. So given only the latter in the formative days of conservation the pioneers choose it as a symbol and begin to investigate its conservation. Panda porn, or the lack of it, made us all giggle in the sixties and seventies and gradually the fat pied ones became greater than the sum of the sense in keeping them alive. But having spent so much it's very difficult to stop. We are now spending millions and millions of dollars on a loser which lives in a country being stormed by the whole worlds greedy despite its horrible politics. It's Catch 22 for Pandas and we're caught by the credit cards despite our very own desperate credit crisis. So I say stop, save our relatively paltry funds for cases where we can make a real difference, because that's our job.
