PANDAS
PHOTO: GETTYSHOULD WE LET
These black and white bears have been a conservation mascot for decades.
But do they have a right to hog the limelight?GO
EXTINCT?
WORDS: JULES HOWARD76T
HERE is a skull that
sits on a shelf on
our wall. There is
a hint of antiquity
to it, though I must
confess that it is
a replica. Upon
noticing the sharp
teeth, children
assume it is from
a dinosaur. They place it on their heads and
go “ROAR!”. Adults know better: they assume
it is from some sort of cat, because they see
its large canine teeth.
They are both wrong. Neither the adults nor
the children ever notice the molars that have
become stretched wide like those of a horse –
an adaptation forged in the depths of China’s
bamboo forests to combat starvation. For the
skull is actually that of an herbivorous bear:
a giant panda, of course. There is always
surprise when I tell people this, it’s as if they’ve
completely forgotten that there are bones
under the skin of this celebrity teddy bear.
This is understandable, because the panda
has become so much more than just ‘a bear’.
Pandas are a conservation mascot, a marketing
tool, a symbol of the wild we are losing, and
a conservation big-hitter worth paying to save.Or so we’re told. Yet, after five decades of our
conservation efforts, they have offered us little
‘bang for our buck’, and a bitter frustration
has begun to play out publicly about their worth
in recent years. Like Premier League footballers
who fail to live up to their hype, nasty slurs
about the pandas have crept onto the pages
of newspapers and websites, blaring things
like “Stuff the pandas!”. Meanwhile, wildlife
presenter and naturalist Chris Packham has
lamented their costly conservation as pointless
and said we should “let them go with a degree
of d ig n it y ”.
But are they really a pointless animal?
Do they have worth? These are interesting
questions to dwell upon, for, if you look closely
at pandas, you begin to understand that wildlife
conservation is far from just black and white.
It is shades of grey, and is only given value by us.A CUDDLY CONCEPTION
Let’s start at the beginning. How did pandas
come to capture the public’s imagination?
What is it about them that we came to love?
In 1966, while panda conservation was still
in its infancy, zoologists Ramona and Desmond
Morris put together a list of why pandas would
come to creep into the public consciousness
in their book Men And Pandas. Included in theirConservationScience