Pandas aren't cute, they're death-loving oxygen-thieves. Let's just eat the idiot-bears

Let me get straight to the point. Pandas are pointless, wasteful and silly. They should die.

Let’s look at the facts here. A lot of conservationists argue that pandas are the victims of man’s actions, that urbanisation and industrialisation is killing the precious bamboo they need to live.

Eh? Bamboo? They are bears, but they eat leaves. Hello, excuse me? Panda bear. Bear. You know, large, aggressive carnivore. Big teeth, claws. Grrrr. You’re supposed to eat meat.

What on earth is with the bamboo thing? A panda’s digestive system is still set up to digest meat. The reason they can only eat only one of the hundreds of different types of bamboo the world has to offer is that their guts aren’t supposed to break down bamboo. It’s elevating fussiness to the level of suicide. It’s like me eating only car tyres and gravel and then asking for sympathy when I starve to death. Idiots.

Years ago as a youth I read a dystopian sci-fi story in Omni magazine.

In it, an overcrowded and polluted world with depleted resources had to triage the animal species it would keep alive versus the ones it would allow to go extinct.

There were no more animals in remaining the wild. All remaining living animals were in zoos.

Funding was tight. Keeping one species alive meant sacrificing another.

The crux of the story was that a loving father broke into a zoo at night and killed/blew up all the animals, because then there would be more funding available for pandas, which were his daughter’s favorite.

I had not thought of that story in 35 years.

This reminds me of several articles on elephants at the Cato Institute. Here are a couple of them:

Save Elephants by Selling Ivory
When You Ban the Sale of Ivory, You Ban Elephants

The gist:

"Residents of the industrialized West wax eloquent when talking of faraway elephants, but to locals the creatures are giant rats, threatening and destructive."
"The current system formally treats elephants as sacred, thereby leaving them for dead. Markets would treat elephants as commercial, thereby keeping them alive."

Given that biologically, pandas are “set up” as omnivores, would it be possible to “teach” a baby panda to eat the diet his body is equipped to process? My understanding is that baby pandas have to be shown by their parents what to eat, and since adult pandas have all been trained by their parents to only eat that one species of bamboo, that’s the only thing they know to teach their offspring. If a baby were raised apart from a bamboo-habituated adult, would it be able to eat meat and other food items?

It would be great to commercialize elephants, but where would you keep them? Elephants consume a staggering amount of food every day, and need huge amounts of space. The elephant herd in Africa currently stands at about 600,000, and that’s extremely close to the maximum carrying capacity of the open land still available to them. If you were to make them more “valuable”, and thus create an interest in increasing the size of the herd, you have to have somewhere to put them all, and that becomes problematic when you have all that farmland that still has to stay productive. Plus, elephants have long gestation times and small birth numbers. A mother elephant can only produce one new baby every 3-5 years (2 years gestation plus raising the calf until it is self-sufficient). You’d have to have a truly gigantic herd to make it possible to harvest usable quantities of ivory without overwhelming the herd’s birth-rate, and the cost of ivory and other elephant by-products would still be sky-high due to the high breakeven point.

On top of that, elephants are extremely dangerous. African elephants particularly. They are capable of incredible amounts of damage if they get ticked off at someone or something, and they do appear to bear grudges. How do you keep them from running roughshod over human settlements if there are suddenly 10 times as many elephants around?

I lived in India for a number of years, and wild elephant herds wandering into settled areas was a real problem. They’re big enough and aggressive enough that they aren’t easily driven off. A herd of bovines or other similar animals can be bullied and intimidated into moving on; elephants are notoriously difficult to intimidate, and will push back. Further, elephants are also big enough to do a lot of inadvertent damage. Indian elephants are particularly fond of palm-wine (a local moonshine brewed in rural areas of India). They can smell it from miles away, and will travel to get it. When they reach a village where someone is making it, they break open every house to try to find it all, and when they’ve consumed it all and gotten drunk, they do the same kinds of things human drunks do: pick fights and throw things, except that where a human might throw beer cans and cups, an elephant will throw trees and motorcycles.

Commercializing elephants can only work if you empty out some huge area to keep them in, such as most of sub-Saharan Africa. If you can pull that off, you might be able to make it work.

4000 bamboo species on the Earth. They will eat seven.

So socially averse and hostile to other pandas they rarely will stay around one long enough even to mate.

Offspring are tiny, prone to many in-utero mishaps, and surviving that, Mom often rolls over and crushes them to death.

Having a hard time figuring out why they aren’t extinct already.

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