Excerpt: 'The Animal Review'

Panda

After toys with lead in them, food products with lead in them and lead toys with food in them, pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, lit. 'black and white black cat foot bear who suffers depression') are China's fourth-biggest export. They are best known for sitting dumbly in zoos around the world while visitors fawn over them and their adorable Chinese names. While about sixteen hundred pandas are alive in the wild, the vast majority (about thirty-two) live in foreign zoos, where most of their time is dedicated to not mating. There are also some pandas in Chinese zoos, which makes as much sense as opening a Taco Bell in the middle of Mexico City: You'll get a few tourists, but the locals know where the authentic, non-mass-produced food (pandas) is (are).

Much ado is made about the plight of the panda. Pandas are endangered due to habitat destruction, the Chinese tradition of poaching, and a hilariously low birth rate. While their exact fertility rates are unknown (it's kind of a personal question), most experts believe that pandas reproduce once every ten million years. This has prompted aggressive captivity breeding programs. These never work, because getting pandas to mate is like launching a satellite into orbit. Simply put, pandas and mating are like Quakers and military drafts. Zookeepers have even resorted to showing them pornography, which is more a measure of desperation than scientific training.

Every so often captive pandas will mate (always by accident), and the local news then runs endless loops of a gross panda cub in an incubator as it plots a life of not mating.

Pandas' problems come from their basic refusal to act like real bears. First of all, real bears like to mate. Real bears also eat things they're supposed to eat. But pandas, despite having the digestive tract of a carnivore that cannot effectively digest cellulose, nevertheless insist on keeping to a diet that is 90 percent bamboo. This means that they have to feed constantly, subtracting from time that could otherwise be spent at least pretending to care about mating.

While everyone worries about the panda's future, any objective observer is led to the conclusion that perhaps its time has passed. Maybe Nature is trying to give them the hint that they need to go the way of the dodo, and maybe we should spend our time on a species that at least wants to survive. In the meantime, pandas occupy valuable zoo space and consume prodigious amounts of bamboo that could otherwise be used to produce offbeat furniture. Way to be, Gao Gao.

In conclusion, pandas are literally a dying breed, and whatever their charms or ability to symbolize goodwill between us and a Communist regime, the species leaves a great deal to be desired.

GRADE: F

Reprinted from The Animal Review: The Genius, Mediocrity, and Breathtaking Stupidity That Is Nature, with permission from Bloomsbury USA: Copyright (c) 2010 by Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash.