A word on Punitive Panda Diplomacy:

The scientists at the San Diego Zoo created a revolution in panda breeding, among other endangered animals. It really is hard to overstate the degree to which these biologists absolutely mastered the art of panda sex. These biologists at the San Diego Zoo likely know more about panda sex than human sex. These scientists built dating apps for these pandas and personally taught them how to flirt, how to dress to impress. They taught the male pandas how to be charming because female pandas have super high standards. These scientists calendared the precise 72 hours of fertility (72 hours per year that female pandas are fertile) and made sure everything is ready, restaurant reservations made, limos scheduled, candles lit, rose petals on the bed, Marvin Gaye on the record player (*Midnight Love*, of course). They thought of everything.

Failing that, these biologists figured out methods of artificial insemination. They created special milk formulas that greatly increase the odds of survival of the babies. The provided free prenatal and postpartum healthcare to these absolutely helpless, blind, useless baby pandas, these creatures that seem to defy the idea of “survival of the fittest” because they are harmlessly unfit in just about every sense—these creatures that look like they were crafted not by natural selection, but by Disney animators, or Beanie Babies, or Lisa Frank. These biologists drafted syllabi, whole curricula for panda parenting free of charge and not to mention free cubbergarten and cubcare for life—in America, we do not afford this level of care to human beings.

And god bless them for this work. There were fewer than wild 1,000 pandas in 1996. As of 2014 that number increased to 1,864, and the species was upgraded from “endangered” to vulnerable in 2016. No institution has been more critical to this success than the San Diego Zoo and I wager here that there is no people (outside of China) that love pandas more than San Diegans. We go ga-ga for these pandas. We buy stuffed animals and wait in long lines at the zoo again and again to watch these little cubbers put on weight. We are riveted by watching them *sleep* and we consider ourselves eyewitnesses of a miracle should the panda, in its penthouse, happen to move. We are on our best behavior when we get to see them in person—be quiet! We know their names and sometimes get tattoos of them. Our newspapers/outlets run regular articles on their development—any development. When we can’t see them in-person we keep the PandaCam <https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/cams/panda-cam-archive> running in the background of our computers just in case we might want to check in, or cleanse our eyes of all the hard thing we must spend our days looking at work or whatever—for which I venture there is no better eyeball soap than Pandacam.

The San Diego Zoo pays China millions of dollars (somewhere around one million per panda per year) for the privilege of participating in this noble international effort to foster panda orgies. It is such a clear win-win, such a positive sign of international collaboration, in an otherwise frigid international environment in which the only path towards staving off the climate apocalypse will be panda-esque cooperation between China and America (and, well, everyone), and insofar as that is true, I welcome the return of the pandas to the San Diego Zoo with a joy that only compares in degree to the sadness I felt when they left in 2019. Say it with me, say it together friends in China and in California— When it comes to pandas, the rule should always be MORE pandas, MORE pandas in every sense, and never, ever less pandas—let us all agree as one that it is wrong to leverage these creatures for retributive political symbolism; do not fuck with our hearts:

NO MORE PUNITIVE PANDA DIPLOMACY.