The Pros of Letting Pandas Go Extinct

We have the money to keep them alive. Should we, though?

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Pardon my naivete, but I'd always thought everything from white rhinos and pandas down to the most insignificant pond lizard was getting some sort of premium treatment whenever their population fell below "2020 toilet paper" numbers.

No playing favorites, you know?

Just because no one in the black market wants to make a trophy or an aphrodisiac soup out of something, that doesn't mean it's not worth saving, no?

Well, I was wrong

It only takes a look at the World Wildlife Fund's gift shop to get a hint of which select group of animals is getting all the hashtags and all-expenses-paid vacations to nature reserves.

They are the elite 1% of the animal world, those whom Darwinism has blessed with marketable appearances — dolphins, lions, gorillas, elephants, humpback whales — creatures that will never have to worry about the grammar being past tense in their Wikipedia entries, for we have their backs.

Not that any of them are perfect. Chimps like to play dodgeball with their poop and dolphins will try to knock out a dolphin-human hybrid baby if they ever meet you by the wrong end.

But the worst has to be the panda

Look, I get the appeal of the panda. They're fluffy, exotic, cheap to print in full color — that's an animal you know got first-class priority boarding at Noah's Ark just by virtue of genetics.

Not for anything China holds the copyright to every panda. It costs 1$ million a year to rent one from them. If a cub is born on foreign soil, it still comes out with a tourist visa and a postcard of the Great Wall.

But that's pandas' biggest problem anyway: their babies. Millions of dollars are thrown every year to keep these desaturated bamboo guzzlers from turning into fossil fuel, and the cretins have the audacity to jerk off to China's one-child policy by giving birth in twins and immediately discarding one of them.

In some cases, they accidentally kill the other by sitting on it.

And that's assuming you can get them to fuck

I don't know why, but something in captive life has made pandas more desensitized to sex than a 4Chan user with a feet fetish and a VPN connection. They're never in the mood. We've even tried to show them panda porn but after countless failed attempts it's become clear we'd have a better chance convincing Leonardo DiCaprio to reach 3rd base with a chick older than 25.

And I don't wanna sound like I'm blaming the panda for its lack of libido. To be honest, I don't know if I could guarantee an erection if I was forced to act in front of a live studio audience of white-gowned aliens rating my performance in their little science notebooks.

But it feels other animals would've better used the money

Others like the yellow-faced bee, the mangrove-dwelling crab, or the tiger shark, hell, the prairie dog, the Tanzanian gremlin — species that are closer than the panda in meeting qualifications for joining the dodo's club, yet they're getting less funding than a Change.org campaign to take back fedoras from the incel community.

Pandas get so much money they could have salmon sushi for breakfast if they wanted. They could shake a little service bell and David Attenborough would poke out of a bush prop to give them a paw rub.

Yet they insist on being disengaged from life, sticking to a sad, low-protein diet that screams "God, take me to the 'Game Over' screen already."

I bet you've never heard of the Bramble Cay melomys

The Bramble Cay melomys is (or rather, was) a small rodent that lived on some island near Australia. It doesn't live there anymore because, well, let's just say Jussie Smollett's career was not the only thing to officially be declared extinct back in 2019.

You probably haven't heard of this, mainly because exotic rodents only made the news that year if they were inside the doner kebabs of the imbeciles who pioneered the human version of covid, so let me summarize. The "official" story was that climate change wiped the melomys out of stock for good.

The real story is a bit shittier though

In that, it paints us humans as a bunch of inconsiderate asswipes. Don't get me wrong, if climate change is powerful enough to make Greta "oiL cORpS bAD" Thunberg a Times cover with nothing more than the inflatable doll of superficial rhetoric, then I trust it can fatality an entire species of rodent by itself.

But putting all the blame on a chain of inhospitable weather forecasts? That strikes me as dishonest.

The simple truth is, the melomys peace’d out of Earth because humanity suffered from a crippling lack of shits to give about it.

We actually knew the melomys was getting close to its expiration date. We knew it for years; we just didn't do anything about it. We left it unattended. And so it faded out of existence —anticlimactically, like a neglected Tamagotchi.

We didn't save the Bramble Cay melomys for a simple reason

The Bramble Cay melomys was a rat.

It was as rat-looking as rats come, and not in a special way, like shooting lightning bolts and shouting "Pika Pika." The melomys was a small, brown, unremarkably dull rat about as exciting to watch as a preflight safety demonstration starring Kristen Stewart.

We don't like to admit this, but if an animal species peaked as a villain in season 1 of Hell's Kitchen, we're not exactly going to take to the streets with signs and pamphlets to put it at the top of conservationism's to-do list.

Being a rat, the melomys could’ve populated the whole of Papua New Guinea with a 4-figure budget and a modest supply of Gatorade, but all they got was crickets.

Some other creatures have it even worse

If you wanna take a deep dive into the pitch-black, absolute rock-bottom of penniless lost causes, take a look at insects and parasites.

To some degree, we all know that insects are to ecosystems what low-resolution cameras are to UFO sightings — you can't take them out without the whole thing falling apart.

And the fact that only the mention of them makes you wanna get a hold of a can of Raid and your most menacing-looking flip flop is a problem — 50% of the worldwide insect population has disappeared in the last 50 years. Completely gone. Snapped away as if Monsanto had been putting Infinity Stones in their pesticide recipes.

And here's something you don't know: parasites are also carrying the health of ecosystems on their tiny, microscopic backs. They have a controlling role in nature, similar to predators. I've read they even provide natural pest control worth billions of dollars.

But you try to sell "parasite conservation" to a kid. Try to get them to play with an action figure of a protozoan with the superpower to send them on a teeth-clenching journey of untamed diarrhea and you'll understand why it'd be easier to sell a daycare center at Jeffrey Epstein's island.

Meanwhile, pandas got yet another billion-dollar sanctuary so they can safely keep not having sex with each other.

This kinda reminds me of that "Hot Mugshot Guy"

In 2014, Jeremy Meeks went to jail for some reason. It could've been armed robbery, physical assault, landing on the wrong tile of a Monopoly game — nobody cared. The point is, the guy looked like a gene pool lottery winner on his mugshot. A solid eight in physical attractiveness, and that is rating him on a 1-5 scale.

Well, zero job interviews and not a single month of LinkedIn Premium later and this guy was already getting thousand-dollar donations from complete strangers. He then got out of jail having changed his life's difficulty settings to "Easy Mode," immediately jumpstarting a successful modeling career.

Don't get me wrong...

I'm not saying people like Jeremy or creatures like the panda don't deserve to be saved. Some things are born into this world carrying two ears and a one-way ticket to the good life in between them. Nothing we average-looking life forms can do about it.

But it's not that we save the wrong things. It's that we save them for the wrong reasons.

In the end, conservationism is just another popularity contest

It's often said that pandas get so much money out of it because they're a "symbol of conservation." Of course they are.

Try to become a symbol of anything whilst looking like a big-nosed proboscis monkey, a blobfish, a naked mole rat, or an aye-aye, a lemur that is the spitting image of a four-legged ballsack going through a rough emo phase.

If natural selection had had any kind of foresight, it would've given every animal a fuzzy belly and a pair of floppy ears, but never mind. Some of them got a stinger for an ass, and that is what got them to drop in the billions, ignored, unsupervised.

Call it habitat destruction, call it toxic pollution, call it a 6th mass extinction.

What if pandas went extinct?

Would it free people from the spell of pretty privilege? Would this dystopian Got Talent-like shit parade of animals being judged by their capacity to make people do the Heart-Eyes Smiling Face Emoji come to an end? Would the money and attention spread out more evenly, with both donors and scientists starting to notice other less charismatic species?

Probably not.

But then, why call it "conservationism" at all? If there's one thing in the world that doesn't need to be saved, that thing is probably beauty.