Panda-preoccupation Payback

The goal of this blog is to unmask the secrets of cute animals and reveal how they cloud men's (and women's) minds. And there's no animal that does a better job of that than the panda.

Millions of dollars are spent on conserving this animal that scientists admit is basically crummy. People want baby pandas so badly that they're willing to humiliate themselves to help them reproduce. And zoos have even gone so far as to silence other animals' expressions of dissent against the panda-industrial complex.

Frankly, I'm so tired of fighting this battle that I can only be pleased by recent news of a plan to exploit this ridiculous obsession. An entrepreneur in China is growing tea organically fertilized by panda poop, and he's going to milk idiot panda-lovers for every last cent he can:

Each lot of 50 grams will then go for 22,000 yuan (£2,200), which according to Mr An makes for the world's dearest cup of tea.

Most people use about three grams per cup, meaning each one brewed would set one back over £130.

That's about 200 US dollars at current exchange rates.

There must be some reader of this blog with the business sense to jump on this and import the stuff. After all, nothing else seems to be working to get the economy going again. If there's a chance we can pull this country out of a recession by standing on the backs of panda-lovers, there is nothing that would please me more.


In the meantime, contribute to economic activity by buying that bad panda t-shirt here.

Mainstream media fails to ferret out pro-panda plot

It's not often that a news story makes me as ambivalent as this seemingly insignificant article about the Edinburgh zoo penguin colony being shut for maintenance.

Seems routine and hardly of interest to an outsider, right? Only the most attentive reader would realize the import: This is apparently the same penguin colony we reported on a few months ago because it was pooping on visitors lined up along the side of its exhibit.

You'd think I'd berate such behavior, but there was a twist: The visitors were waiting in line to see the zoo's new panda exhibit.

There are few animals as infuriating as pandas. Their power to cloud our minds with cuteness is unsurpassed. Millions of dollars are spent to bring them to American zoos where they sit and do no more than a stuffed animal would. And yet more money is spent convincing them to reproduce in captivity, with deranged humans going so far as to dress up in panda suits to raise the babies.

So although I rarely side with animals against humans, there was a bigger issue at stake here, and I praised the penguins for their anti-panda poo protest.

And now we see the risk when you try to raise a stink about pandas: The protesting penguins are being forcibly relocated - some until the summer when their exhibit is scheduled to reopen, but some permanently.

The report by the Edinburgh Evening News does refer to the zoo's pandas, but it's clearly an irrelevant side note, dropped in simply because no reporter can write a story about a zoo with pandas without mentioning them:

Meanwhile, Edinburgh Zoo’s giant panda pair, Tian Tian and Yang Guang, are ready to welcome their 100,000th visitor today, less than four months after arriving from China.

The reporter seems oblivious of the history between these penguins and the pandas. And it was obviously not mentioned by zoo publicists - who are a major part of the panda-industrial complex and no doubt insiders to this conspiracy.

The story also notes that while the relocation is temporary for some of the penguins, some are moving as far away as Belfast and Denmark, and "Some will never return."

This is surely significant. Decisions about where to send zoo animals are never made randomly. What better opportunity for the pro-panda cabal to identify the ringleaders and put a permanent stop to their demonstration?


Photo of the penguin perp walk from the Edinburgh Evening News. Will any of our Scottish readers stand up for these brave protestors? Occupy Pandas!

Not safe in our own homes

You might think you're safe from animals as long as you stay indoors and aren't foolish enough to invite any to live with you. But animal home invasion is an escalating trend.

In December we saw a seal lounging on a sofa and a bear living in a basement. In October it was a deer breaking into a man's home workshop. And this is leaving aside bears breaking into more public places like pizza shops and candy stores and bovines in bars and shopping malls.

And here are three more reports from all over the world, just in the past month:

-On Christmas Eve, a family in Utah was expecting their holiday to include only fictional deer. But a large buck crashed through a window, spending two hours trampling furniture and gifts before wildlife officers could arrive to subdue it.

-In the suburbs of a city in China, a red panda tried to sneak into a home while the residents were picnicking in the yard - although it appeared to have second thoughts once they started taking video of it.

-In perhaps the most frightening case, a 74-year-old woman in England had to save her Chihuahua from a hawk. The raptor first attacked the pup on the patio, then followed it into the house. After wrestling the bird off the dog three times, she finally chased it out. The brave woman told reporters, “I just said ‘you’re damn not going to kill him’."

Keep your doors locked and your windows barred... and come back Monday for more reasons to watch your back.

Penguin poo panda protest

When one bad animal is pitted against another, you might think I'd want them both to lose. But in this conflict, the choice of side is a black-and-white one.

This blog has often bemoaned the inexplicable human obsession with pandas. At zoos, they do nothing but sit there while people flock to see them. There is even scientific evidence that the panda is basically a crummy animal. One researcher recently commented that, looking at its bamboo-digesting capabilities:

"I see a very badly adapted animal. The main way the panda has adapted to the low-quality diet is not via microbiota, like the vast majority of other animals, but by eating 15 hours per day."

But boring behavior and inferior biology are helpless to counteract the effects of a cute black and white face with those adorable little eye patches. The urge to produce baby pandas is so overwhelming some keepers are even willing to make fools of themselves dressing up in panda suits to raise them.

And this obsession has serious consequences. As we've noted before, not even scientists are immune to the lure of the cute animal, with far more attention going to conservation of conventionally attractive, big furry creatures.

In a recent example of this bias, the National Zoo recently got a donation of 4.5 million dollars to its panda breeding program. One wonders how many entire species of, say, critically endangered frogs, could be saved from extinction with this amount of money. Instead, it'll be used to produce a baby animal that, judging from photos like the one above, we seem to have plenty of - in China where the darn things belong.

So we're heartened by a recent story out of Scotland, where the Edinburgh Zoo recently acquired a pair of pandas, with great fanfare mostly drowning out the few voices of reason proclaiming them a big cuddly waste of money.

But some zoo residents are expressing their opinion in the clearest and most un-ignorable way possible. Rockhopper penguins are gathering along the edge of their exhibit, which looks out over the long line of vistors waiting to see the pandas, and pooping on them:

A 41-year-old, who was standing in the panda queue on Sunday said: "We were queuing to see the pandas when a man in front shouted out in surprise that his jacket had been hit by a big dollop of penguin poo.

It just missed me and my family and it was really oily and stank of fish. It was disgusting."

The zoo is, of course, planning to build a barrier to protect the panda-obsessed, but we are pleased to praise these penguins for their stinking salvos in the anti-panda cause.

Not all our fault

Animal lovers feel guilty for the terrible things humans are doing to the planet that are driving other species to the brink of extinction. And while this blog is not necessarily in favor of paving wildlife habitat, spewing pollutants into the atmosphere, dumping trash into the ocean, spilling chemicals in waterways... still, it's only fair to note that some animals really aren't helping.

We've noted this before in the case of pandas, which are so bad at reproducing that keepers have been forced to show them porn and dress up in panda suits in their efforts to keep the species going.

But not all animals are so passive about their slide into nonexistence. Tigers seem to be taking a more active role. Last month at a zoo in Texas, a female Malayan tiger killed her mate. The Malayan tiger is critically endangered, with only an estimated 500 left in the wild, and these two individuals had been brought together at the zoo especially for breeding purposes.

But for at least one of these animals, perpetuating the species apparently took a back seat to relationship problems. Zoo officials were quoted after the attack saying "we never saw this coming." But in fact it came, as Reuters put it, after "months of simmering jealousy in a feline love triangle."

The zoo had two female tigers, who were kept apart because they didn't get along - but took turns keeping company with the male. It seems that this system worked no better than it would with most human relationships, with one staff member quoted as saying "The girls are jealous of each other." Yet apparently it was assumed that neither of the ladies would place any blame on the male for enjoying the other female's company. This vision of tiger open-relationship harmony was proven a delusion when finally, one of them just couldn't take it anymore.

And this wasn't the only recent example of a rare tiger reducing the population of its species by one. At a conservation reserve in South Africa, a male South China tiger broke into the enclosure of a younger male, who killed the intruder. The South China species may be extinct in the wild, and there are only a few dozen in captivity. The reserve is run by a group called Save China's Tigers which is breeding the animals and trying to train them to survive in the wild for reintroduction to their native habitat.

Way to help them save you, tigers. I think I'll be donating my conservation dollars to some nice frogs instead.


Tigers "play fighting," yeah maybe, by Flickr user Martin Heigan.

Vacation Linkarama

While I'm trying to relax at the beach despite having read the last story linked to below, enjoy some high quality bad animal reporting and analysis from elsewhere on the web:

A brave fellow at Gizmodo presents the evidence: Why we should just let the damn pandas go extinct, already

At the Guardian: That pet cat who turned up after five years - heartwarming tale or feline conspiracy?

A world traveller keeps track of the number of birds (and one bat) that have crapped on her

And before you laugh at that: Scientists implicate seagulls in the worldwide spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

And now I'm off to the beach - no, on second thought, the nice bird-free outlet mall.

Biting news briefs

- At the San Diego zoo, a keeper was rushed to the hospital after being bitten by panda Bai Yun. The LA Times notes:

Despite their cuddly appearance, pandas, in the wild or in captivity, are known for quick changes of temperament that can lead to aggressiveness, zoo officials said.

You've been warned. (And it's not the first time.)

-In Israel, a model famous for her ample artificially enhanced bosom was bitten by a snake during a photo shoot. Then, on the Internet, the story that the snake had died of silcone poisoning went viral.

However, the remark about the snake dying was actually a joke, as explained by the original site that started it all.

Here at this blog we can understand the impulse to jump on the rare story where a bad animal got what was coming to it, but check your sources, people.

(You can see video at that link, if you're into that sort of thing, you sicko.)

-Remember the dog we reported on earlier this month who ate three of his owner's toes?

Well, that cute little Shiba Inu is up for adoption!

Don't knock each other over in the rush!



Adorable shiba teeth by Flickr user Daniel Gipps.

Doing it wrong

Pandas: Don't get me started on pandas. Now, I actually agree that humans should feel guilty about driving so many species to extinction, and we should do something about it. But we have to pick our battles. Millions of dollars and years of research have been spent trying to get reluctant pandas to breed in captivity. How many more-cooperative species could have been saved with that expense and effort?

But pandas have the power to cloud minds, and people go to absurd lengths for them. In China, they've even gone as far as to show pandas porn to encourage them to mate. And the latest report is that keepers are now dressing up in panda suits to work with cubs that are going to be released into the wild.

They claim that it's important that the cubs not get used to the sight of humans. Which could well be correct, but for this solution to work, we have to assume that pandas cannot tell the difference between another panda and a human in a panda suit:

1. By how it looks

2. By how it smells

3. By how it behaves, for example:

-picking up panda cubs and carrying them around in plastic containers (see above)

-taking its head off:


And if all this is true, seriously, should we really be knocking ourselves out to save an animal that is that dumb?

Give us a break, Pandas

Repeat offender panda Gu Gu of the Beijing Zoo is at it again, biting a man who climbed into this exhibit to retrieve a dropped toy.
OK, maybe you can't blame him for taking offense at that, but what about the guy who just wanted a hug? And he's not the only panda to take offense at a visitor's desire to cuddle. Pandas will also bite the hand, or even the leg that feeds them.


Sure, all of those humans are complete idiots, but come on, pandas, cut us a little slack. We're just doing what comes naturally. How else do you expect people to act, if you're going to be so damn cute?





(Panda teeth from photo by Flickr user diskychick.)