Seriously, Pandas Are Freakin’ Scary
So I’m dressing up as a panda bear for Halloween. I did it last year, I’m doing it again this year. With big black circles painted around my eyes, and a big panda hood, a white furry bra, black fuzzy leg warmers, the whole deal. Okay, so I live in Los Angeles and I’m kind of a sexy panda bear (that’s a thing right?). But I’m serious about the fact that a panda costume is, in fact, a scary costume. Don’t believe me?
1. Pandas are bears, dude.
Seriously, though. They’re of the Ursidae family – that’s “bear” in Latin. Their family members include grizzly bears, polar bears, and brown bears. You know, that terrifying large bear that attacked Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall? Yeah, bears.
Pandas seem adorable. There’s been a lot of panda propaganda out there, selling these fluffy, chubby, bamboo-chewing, black-and-white creatures as harmless as the dirty red Communism of their home country – but don’t you believe it! Pandas evolved to eat flesh and are more than capable of chewing you up just as well as their grizzly cousins. Oh, and they’re territorial as all hell.
There’s a blog out there that lists some panda attacks, and they vary from wild to captive bears – because again, they’re freakin’ bears. In 2008, some idiot actually entered a panda enclosure at a zoo in southern China because he wanted to “cuddle” the animal. He was hospitalized from bites. Because IT’S A BEAR.
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…
3. They have no will to live.
Okay, so that’s not perfectly accurate. A live panda will fight to survive. They just don’t seem to have any natural inclination to further their species. Their disinclination towards breeding has led to ridiculous tactics within captivity – including things like feeding them Viagra and showing them videos of other bears procreating (bear porn, seriously). Zoos often resort to artificial insemination. The bears, in return, can have “fake” pregnancies. I’m not kidding. Read about it.
From a strictly natural perspective, a female panda has about 16 years of fertility. Except she only ovulates a couple of days a year. She can’t handle more than one pregnancy in two years. If she has twins (not uncommon), she will abandon the weaker one. Oh, and without humans there to play matchmaker, they are prone to inbreeding.
Ultimately, it appears pandas have hit an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” (credit to Chris Packham for that phrase). They are not evolving to survive, as a species.
That’s terrifying.
So, panda costume = terrifying. Get it now?