Giant pandas are ludicrous creatures. They turned themselves from meat eaters into vegetarians who have to chomp on one of the world's least nutritious plants (bamboo) for up to 16 hours a day to gain enough sustenance, they climb trees but can't climb down so land on their heads as a means of getting down, they are lazy, they eat their own poo and they hate sex.
So how come Darwinism hasn't got them yet?
Despite not having much more than black and white fur to scare off predators and often being too fat to run away, luckily pandas are large enough to have no real predators in China other than man, who presumably finds them too meltingly cute to shoot, much though man has encroached on their habitat over the years meaning fewer bamboo-rich mountainsides.
And just as British monarchs have always favoured the swan as a royal symbol, pandas found patrons in the Emporers of China, who evidently found them as as aaaaaaawwwww-inspiring as we do and helped shield them from the rest of the world until the early 20th century.
