Do not panda to misty-eyed sentiment

This story is part of the FT Weekend Magazine’s Archives Issue.

More sinister than Opus Dei; more money than the US National Rifle Association; more lobbying power than French farmers. Every week, the worldwide panda industry strikes another blow for soft-headed sentiment over rational cost-benefit analysis.

This week’s feelgood tale was new research suggesting there were 3,000 giant pandas left in the wild, twice earlier estimates. So what? If pandas can stand on their own four feet, good. If they cannot, tough. We should stop subsidising them. Pandas are endangered because they are hopelessly incompetent.

Take their diet. As we all know from the pro-panda propaganda, pandas eat almost exclusively bamboo shoots. What panda apologists ignore is that, though fine as a side dish with Szechuan beef and egg-fried rice, bamboo has so few nutrients that the piebald buffoons have to spend 16 hours a day stuffing themselves with it. It is like trying to subsist on sugar-coated cardboard.

To shovel twigs into their mouths they use what Big Panda tries to pass off as an opposable thumb but is basically a deformed bone. And ridiculously, given their diet, giant pandas have a short digestive tract suitable for carnivores, not vegetarians, so most of the bamboo they eat goes through undigested.

They are also famously bad at sex. Even in the wild pandas do not mate much, and those in zoos are often so uninterested they have to be shown panda pornography first. Sceptics can look this up on Google.

Little wonder no respectable family of animals wants them. For a while zoologists reckoned they were distant relatives of raccoons. Now, no doubt after lavish “research grants” to laboratories from the panda industry, they think they are bears. Clearly, though, they have “raccoon” written all over them: solitary, furry, black and white, superficially cute but fundamentally vermin.

Yet thanks to soft-headed anthropomorphism – their big eyes and round faces remind us of babies, apparently – they are fêted everywhere, notably as the logo of the charity WWF.

And do not try that guff about cuteness as an evolutionary strategy. Humans have found furry things cute for a few thousand years. Evolution takes millions. That is not natural selection: it is dumb luck.

It is not as if this misguided sentiment comes free. China exacts a high diplomatic price for its “panda diplomacy”. Even the zoo in Washington DC, famous for its pandas, does not own them but rents them from China for about $1m a year apiece. Now there’s a trade deficit to get het up about. For $1m you could rent a senator.

Case closed. Pandas are badly designed, undersexed, overpaid and overprotected. They went up an evolutionary cul-de-sac and it is too late to reverse. By cosseting them we are simply rewarding failure. Pandas are doomed. Let them go.

The author is the FT’s world trade editor. He sports a proper opposable thumb, eats most things and has a digestive system perfectly suited to his omnivorous diet