Let Pandas Die?
September 25th 2009 18:31
If you have ever watched a documentary on pandas you may have noticed they are peculiar beasts. They subsist on a type of food which is not very nutritious so they have to eat a lot of it. If their food supply becomes threatened or endangered, because they can't switch to another they starve. They breed slowly and sometimes not at all.
So some have braved the wrath of the Cute and Fuzzy patrol and asserted that mankind should stop subsidizing the panda. They have suggested that pandas represent a evolutionary dead end and that they should be allowed to die out.
I have had this thought myself, now and again. My thinking was not that mankind should do something deliberately to let pandas die but rather that in the case of pandas we are being given by nature a very clear message and that we are ignoring that message on purpose--because we can.
Some try to make a similar argument with people. Babies are born with defects all the time and we fight to save them. Under Obama care that will soon end--cost benefit analysis. Try to look surprised when it happens.
But as for myself, as a wearer of glasses, and as one who walks around with metal in my mouth that I wasn't born with, I feel fortunate and blessed that I was not set out on an ice floe to die the moment I got a step slower. Moreover, in my view, fried chicken does not have the rights, duties and responsibilities that I have so I believe that any human has more right to live than any animal--even your pet poodle, or a panda.
I am enough of a libertarian to say that free people should be able to use their own money to save pandas, stink bugs, slime molds or whatever. But I would rather that government funds were not spent to save non-human species.
For those who are troubled by the notion that we may be interfering with human evolution by not allowing the non-viable to die, I am relatively certain that in the secret labs of some totalitarian regime they are building the perfect humans who will some day rule the earth so just wait for that show to unfold.
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