A joke by Lynne Truss begins, “A panda walks into a café, orders a sandwich, eats it, draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.” When the waiter asks what the panda was doing, the panda throws a poorly punctuated book at him and says, “I’m a panda, look it up,” before leaving the café. Within the book there is an entry about pandas that states, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Fortunately, pandas do not actually carry around guns. The shoots to which the joke is referring are bamboo shoots, the panda’s main form of nourishment. Pandas need 28 pounds of bamboo to satisfy their daily nutritional needs, thus they spend twelve hours a day eating! These incredible animals sometimes climb to heights above 13,000 feet for food during the summer in the mountainous regions of central China. A fully-grown adult stands at almost five feet and weighs 220 to 330
pounds. Unfortunately, only about 1,000 of these beautiful creatures are left in the wild.
While there are some natural causes for the panda’s endangerment, most of them are human-related. The areas in which pandas live are being destroyed due to bamboo harvesting, the conversion of forests to agricultural areas, and China’s ever-expanding human population. Besides bamboo, other
plants which pandas eat are being taken by humans to be used in medicine. As if taking away their land and food was not enough, humans are also killing them for their meat and fur. Poachers pose an enormous threat not only to the pandas they kill, but the existence of the species as a whole. All of these factors contribute to the fragmentation of pandas’ living spaces, which further adds to the reasons for their endangerment.
Interestingly enough, Americans would not know as much about pandas if they were not endangered. Since its founding in 1961, the World Wildlife Fund has used the panda as its trademark symbol, making pandas the figureheads of endangered species throughout the world. The famous WWF panda can be seen on bags, t-shirts, hats, and other merchandise as well as billboard advertisements. Pandas represent everything from becoming eco-friendly to saving the rainforest.
However, nowadays when people state, “I want Panda,” it is not the actual animal to which they are referring. What they really want is Chinese take-out from Panda Express. In addition to everything else, pandas symbolize the Chinese influence present in American culture. Even if it is not Panda Express, many Chinese-American restaurants have pandas decorating their walls, plates, or even fish ponds. Throughout the U.S., pandas have become beloved, symbolic animals.