Cherish your pets, time moves quickly.

I had a German Shepherd once, the best dog I ever had!

oh boy oh boy OH BOY

hello anon i have some Things to say about pandas 

1. Pandas have an extremely low birth rate and female pandas are only fertile for a VERY small amount of time per year. If a panda has twins, they’ll only care for one of them and leave the other to die AND pandas can only have like, 5-8 cubs in their lifetime. [x]

2. Pandas are evolved from carnivorous bears, right? But instead of STAYING carnivorous like the smart bears, these black and white disasters decide that they’re going to eat BAMBOO instead, which contains very little nutrients so they have to eat a LOT of it. They spend up to 16 hours a day eating bamboo and but their digestive systems can’t even process it properly because, again, they were descended from carnivores. [x]

3. Natural disasters can cause EVEN LOWER birthrates than they already have. [x] 

4. These guys have procreation problems in captivity. They don’t have sex. Zoo keepers have tried everything (including showing the pandas panda porn), but these guys still don’t want to have sex. They’d rather be eating. 

5. When they DO have sex, it’s usually with family members and they ALSO fake pregnancies. [x][x]

6. This is what really gets me right here… We spend MILLIONS of dollars trying to get these animals to breed. MILLIONS of dollars that could be spent towards other species that actually need it. 

This is a really good paragraph by Lynne Warren: [x]

Hosting giant pandas costs each zoo an average of 2.6 million dollars a year, and that’s if no babies arrive. Add a cub, and the budget tops three million dollars. Add two cubs (nearly half of panda pregnancies produce twins), and the tab approaches four million dollars. 

“Nobody,” says David Wildt, head of the National Zoo’s reproductive sciences program, “would ever commit this kind of money to any other species.”

This is also a good article by Christine Dell'Amore.

Another good article by Lizzie Buchen that I’m going to highlight:

About 22 percent of all mammals are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but the percentage is significantly higher for creepy, crawly, backbone-less invertebrates, which enrich the soil, filter water, recycle nutrients, pollinate plants, decompose animal carcasses and waste products, play a vital role in the food chain, and inspire biomimetic creations.

What are pandas good for? Why are invertebrates (a group that includes the three most endangered groups of animals in the United States) seemingly absent from conservation planning strategies, while the panda receives a great proportion of our efforts and our concern, not to mention tens of millions of dollars for captive breeding programs?