Sex, Celebrity, and the Single Panda
October 24, 2005 at 2:22 WASHINGTON —Freedom, as Janis Joplin observed, sometimes ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I believe “just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” was the way Janis defined it.
I found myself thinking about Janis’ lyric when I spoke to my friend Colleen O’Brien of PETA in Norfolk , Va. about the Giant Panda cub at the Smithsonian National Zoo.
The 3-month-old cub is currently the rock star of the animal kingdom, attracting a mob of panda paparazzi to a press conference to announce the choice of his name in an online vote. This, even though there was never any plan for the baby panda to appear and despite the fact that he actually snoozed through the big event in the privacy of his den.
National Zoo Director John Berry announced the name Tai Shan (pronounced tie-SHON), which means “peaceful mountain” in Chinese, was selected.
“You can bet they would never choose a name like ‘Freedom,’ because that’s one thing this poor cub will never see,” PETA’s O’Brien, a real panda-party-pooper, told me.
“The pandas who are born in captivity have no hope of ever being to the wild because they aren’t able to learn survival skills,” she said.
She pointed out that the National Zoo had paid the People’s Republic of China $10 million to “rent” the panda cub’s parents for 10 years.
“There has been a great deal of concern that China’s ‘rent-a-panda’ program is doing more harm than good because the focus has shifted from habitat preservation to producing captive-born cubs who can be loaned out to zoos for millions of dollars,” O’Brien told me. “In some cases, pandas are actually being removed from the wild for this purpose.”
Keep in mind please, that I am sympathetic to PETA and agree with many of the organization’s ideas. I even have an ambition of donning a cow suit for PETA some day to harass Ronald McDonald.
But I found myself thinking that little Tai Shan doesn’t have it all that bad.
I had to leave my warm comfortable bed at 4:30 a.m. and sit in gridlocked traffic for three hours to get to Washington in time for his naming ceremony. Meanwhile, he slept in till noon .
I also found myself thinking that, while I would be “free” if my wife kicked me out of the house, my own survival skills in the wild have never been anything to brag about. And that, since I’d have about $5 a week left after alimony and child support, I’d probably find myself sleeping in a cardboard box atop a heating grate somewhere.
At least Tai Shan has a fur coat.
Think for a moment about the panda “plight” in captivity. Adored by not millions, but billions, they laze around, having their picture taken, and are fed well. They don’t have to commute. Their “work” is having sex. And when they do their “job,” it’s treated with such fanfare you’d think they’d found a cure for cancer.
Outside of captivity, in their natural environment, they do about as well as I do in mine. Which means they live on the moral equivalent of free beer nuts they scrounge at bars, can’t even read the paper or watch cable in their den because they keep forgetting to pay the electric bill, and rarely get any action.
So here’s Tai Shan’s fat, furry, little captive behind sitting in a million-dollar home built for him at the zoo by Fujifilm, with Katie Couric and Soledad O’Brien oohing and aahing over him—and PETA’s saying we should feel sorry for him.
This is one case where repression is warm and fuzzy, and the idea of freedom leaves me cold.
The writer is a journalist, baseball coach, and FOVG (Friend of V-Grrrl). She loves his wicked sense of humor, ability to throw a curve ball at readers, spin stories until they hum, and play left field. His writing on V-Grrrl in the Middle is archived under Mike on the Bottom.
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