Photo by Edward L
This has been bugging me for a week now.
After all the hullabaloo of selling incinerators and oil refineries to the Chinese, it emerged that a couple of years' worth of negotiations had come to fruition and the Chinese were gifting a couple of pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.
There was a collective "Awww, cute, pandas!" from almost the entire population. The media uncritically saw this as a good thing and the management of the zoo saw pound signs whirling in front of them.
But hang on - since when are critically endangered species a commodity, to be bandied around to the people who bend over backwards far enough?
In fact, forget the "critically endangered" bit. Should we be using other species as a "gift" in these supposedly enlightened times?
I've never been convinced of the argument for zoos - that they provide a safe haven for species that are endangered, and give scientists a place to study animals and their behaviour. With whole TV channels dedicated to wildlife documentaries, is there really a need for locking animals in a cage in this day and age? Why is it better to study a lion in an enclosure in Scotland compared to a pride of lions on the plains of Africa?
As cute as they are, the pandas should stay in their natural habitat. And although they're an evolutionary dead-end, they have at least evolved enough to know that a fenced off area of a Scottish city is NOT where they should be.
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