The chances of getting a replacement are poor, with Tokyo’s relations with Beijing at their lowest point in years amid tensions over Taiwan.
Japanese panda fans gathered Sunday for the final public viewing at Tokyo’s Ueno zoo before twins Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei return to China this week.
Their departure on Tuesday will leave Japan with no pandas for the first time in half a century, and the chances of getting a replacement are poor, with Tokyo’s relations with Beijing at their lowest point in years.
China first sent pandas to Japan in 1972, a gift meant to mark the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two wary neighbors. The cuddly black-and-white bears immediately won Japanese hearts, and a dozen successors have become national celebrities.
pandas are not a necessity. Sooner we get over it, the better.
They’re not even trying to exist. Why force them to?
Sorry I’m late, but is this even true, though? My understanding is that their population is only endangered due to human mass deforestation, and that the reproductive difficulties we see with Pandas are specific to captivity.
It’s not that they’re not trying to exist, it’s just that we took away their natural environments and they’re just not made for an artificial environment. There are plenty of animals that can’t live/reproduce in captivity, and it’s not because they’re not trying.
Idk, I’m not an expert on Pandas, but imo it feels incredibly arrogant for us to decimate their habitats, imprison them in artificial environments, blame them for being unable to adapt to the conditions that we inflicted on them, and then allow them to die as if that was somehow their desire or predetermined end.