Forget the Warm Tinglies for Washington’s Pandas

By Colman McCarthy

Not everyone is in a state of civic euphoria over the presence of Tian Tian and Mei Xiang at the National Zoo’s new panda preserve. While it’s true that the ponds, cooling grottoes, sand wallows and other luxuries amount to a Club Med for animals, it’s factual also that the two pandas—born as captives, they’ll die as captives—are no more than prisoners.

Cute, yes. Gamboling, yes. Novel, yes. But free from human control, profiteering and exploitation as nature intended them to be? No.

The near-unanimous gushing from the media over the magnetism of the giant pandas--“Washington’s new power couple,” “so cuddly, so like us”—brings into focus the prevailing double standard that’s in play when humans arbitrarily divide animals into categories. Some are adorable and wanted, others are expendable and unwanted.

Keiko the orca whale of “Free Willie” renown is in the first group, along with Babe the pig, Canadian seal pups, bald eagles—Bill Clinton displayed one on the South Lawn in July 1999—and now Tian Tian and Mei Xiang. But every day that the pandas are adulated and celebrated, more than 12 million factory-farmed cows, hogs, chickens, turkeys and other animals are having their bodies sliced, packaged and shipped. These are the expendable and unwanted, even though their instinctual drives to live free and unharmed exactly match the pandas.

Among those not experiencing the warm tinglies that appear to have overtaken much of Washington is Paul Shapiro. A Peace Studies major at George Washington University, he is the director of Compassion Over Killing, a non-profit that works to end human-caused suffering among all species. Shapiro, who doesn’t visit zoos for the same reason he doesn’t tour prisons to stare at caged humans, argues that if “the National Zoo were interested in helping animals, it wouldn’t imprison them merely for tourists to gawk at. Rather, it wold spend its resources on saving remaining natural habitat.”

Shapiro has written that zoos attempt “to teach us and our children that it is acceptable to keep animals in captivity, leading lives of boredom in settings that bear almost no relation to their natural homes… The purposeless existence that goes along with captivity often cause the animals to engage in abnormal and self-destructive behavior known as ‘zoochosis.’”

The philosophical difference between the thinking of dissenters like Shapiro and the keepers of the giant pandas is the one between animal rights and animal welfare. Animal welfarists believe in being kind to creatures whenever possible, but exceptions occur—such as human desires for food, clothing, research. Animal rightsers say no to selectivity. Animals have rights, because they have interests that come before supplying benefits to human.

In “Animals, Property and the Law” (Temple University Press), Gary Francione, a law professor at Rutgers University, argues that regulatory laws for animal welfare do little or nothing to protect the interests of animals: “Animal welfare is the view that it is morally acceptable, at least under some circumstances, to kill animals or subject them to suffering as long as precautions are taken to ensure that the animals is treated as ‘humanely’ as possible. An animal welfare position generally holds that there is no animal interest that cannot be overridden if the consequences of the overriding are sufficiently ‘beneficial’ to human beings.”

Benefits aplenty are resulting from the pandas presence in Washington: tourists’ money to the zoo, $10 million in rent-a-panda cash to China and bursts of bustle from researchers catching Tian Tian and Mei Xiang’s every move and twitch through 20 cameras. But what benefits, aside from munching on high-fiber biscuits, will the two imprisoned pandas –pieces of property--enjoy? They’ll be treated well, of course, but Thomas Jefferson and other aristocratic slavemasters said the same about the blacks they owned. Alice Walker wrote: “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.”

China receives another benefit—a public relations boost, a projection of a humane image that it cares deeply about protecting the endangered giant panda bears. But what about the less adorable and less wanted but also endangered Asiatic black bears in China? According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a Yarmouth Port, Mass., group, more than 7,600 endangered animals of this species—called moon bears from the golden crescent in the fur on their chests—are caged on Chinese bile farms. Bile is extracted when “crude catheters are implanted in the (bears’) stomachs to drain the bile from their gall bladders. The bile is sold for traditional Chinese medicine,” at the same time that herbal alternatives to bear bile exist. Some reforms have occurred, and bears released, owing to an exposure campaign waged in 1995 by the fund. But for the moon bears still held on large numbers of bile farms, their treatment is about as bleak as China inflicts on its political prisoners.

Perhaps the thousands of people rushing to catch the new royal couple at the National Zoo will take time to look in on the blank-eyed spiritless non-royals whose species isn’t endangered but who remain caged anyway. And outside the zoo, and outside all of them, why not respect the rights of bald eagles and cows, dolphin and tuna, Babe and all pigs, household pets and wild deer, Keiko and all the Wilies of the sea?