btw i highly recommend dropping to your knees with a forlorn expression every time something mildly inconveniences you
how can any language be ‘ugly’ if it’s always also the language passed along from a mother to her child, the language of two lovers in the dark, the language of stories told by grandfathers, the language of vows and eulogies, the language of learning and singing and feeling and connection and culture… how is all of that not inherently beautiful
Anonymous asked:
I keep seeing people say that pandas are a worthless species and that we're wasting time/resources trying to preserve them just because they're cute and we should just let them go extinct. Is this true?
bunjywunjy answered:
well, here’s the thing- there’s no such thing as a “worthless species” to begin with, because worth is not defined by usefulness to one specific species of uppity bipedal primates, and also! finding one really charismatic species and getting people to care about it enough to protect it is GREAT, actually!
because protecting pandas?
also means protecting literally every other living creature in this ecosystem:
and there is. LOTS of those.
thus, pandas act as a huge furry-and-adorable umbrella to every other animal that shares their habitat, shielding them from the terrible metaphorical rainstorm of habitat loss and human encroachment through the power of being just really, REALLY cute.
every environment on earth needs a panda umbrella species if we want to protect it in the age of extinction. what will it be for yours?
Honestly I think the problems people have with pandas comes down mostly to phrasing and semantics.
What I mean by this is people have run with the flippant and funny "this animal is literally too stupid to breed and they basically have to be coerced!" Instead of the more nuanced "this animal has adapted to a very specific environment that isn't easily replicated in a concrete building and doesn't easily breed in captivity."
Or they go with "haha pandas are so dumb they have to be shown how to mate, it's like they don't even care" instead of "wow, obviously we're missing large pieces of how panda social structures are supposed to work and more research is needed."
Having a very strict diet, needing a certain amount of range and territory, and having very specific parameters for breeding is very common across a LOT of different animals. Passenger pigeons went extinct partially because they wouldn't brood if they didn't feel secure in a large group. Devil's Hole Pupfish spawn when there's a seismic event that triggers it. Salmon have to thrown themselves bodily up a river to breed in a specific spot and will kill themselves doing so. There are species of millipede that die in captivity because they only eat decaying wood from specific plants and nobody is sure what those plants even are yet. There are countless animals whose breeding activities range from oddly specific all the way to actively fatal.
The fact that a panda doesn't easily make babies like a domestic sheep in a captive setting doesn't make them stupid or useless or even really that much of an outlier. We can't even get most species of bats to reliably do well in captivity and nobody is laughing about how stupid and useless bats are.
Yes, the money and politics surrounding the ownership of captive pandas is incredibly stupid and convoluted. But that wasn't exactly the pandas' idea.
I guess I'm a little salty because I get really peeved by this idea that "Haha! We destroyed and fragmented this animal's habitat and then put it in a cage and tried to force it to breed and it's not succeeding, what a stupid useless animal for doing so poorly!"


















