3 Reasons My Panda Costume is Terrifying

2. We waste so much money trying to save them.

Look, I love animals. I really do. I want to save all the animals from terrible deaths and extinction. Heck, I’m a vegetarian – I’m all about saving animals. But we spend millions on pandas. Millions that could be spent on anything else. On other, less terrifying animals, or more efficient conservation efforts.

Canada spent something like $10 million dollars to rent pandas from China in 2012. Oh yeah, China retains ownership of pandas, so zoos rent them from China at a price of approximately $1 million a pair. If they happen to breed, they charge over half a million for any babies.

The care and keeping of captive pandas, including their diets of approximately 40 pounds of bamboo daily (a tremendously inefficient food for a carnivore) make them the single most expensive zoo animal. In fact, they are five times more expensive than elephants to keep, and elephants are the second more expensive zoo animal.

As there’s only something like 2000 pandas left in the world, they’re considered endangered. Naturally, this means we pour money into attempting to get them to breed as well, which leads me to my third point…