I’m wondering what people’s reactions would be if this poll would be, Would you save a baby over an endangered-but-not-completely-doomed species.
Man, that’s tough. Babies are cute, but I already have a baby and I don’t have any pandas.
That’s my concern too.
And is the panda going to find a cure for cancer?
Seriously. I mean, yeah, deforestation of their habitat, and poaching/hunting them has helped speed up the perhaps inevitable extinction, but I have to wonder if they would ever survive anyway.
They are carnivores that decided “Hey, see this nutritionally devoid grass over here? Let’s eat that. Easier than this hunting and foraging bullshit. And since it’s so nutritionally devoid, all our energy has to be spent just walking to the next patch to eat that. And we have to spend so much time eating, no time to fuck and propagate our species. Just sit here…eat grass…eat more grass…”
do i have both a large supply of strained carrots and bamboo?
You’d have to do a randomised test to really know. What people say and do can be pretty different.
Ethics committee might be a tough one.
Otara
There are a billion or so people in the world who really don’t need to be here. Yes, I AM included.
A generic “human infant” is a dime-a-dozen item the world over (and don’t be so conceited to think “not in MY place of residence” - both you and your place are entirely random).
Panda are an intelligent mammal on the edge of extinction - evan if the Chinese don’t shoot them anymore, their pollution levels are such that I fear for any non-human species in that country.
And baby pandas are WAY cuter than messy, smelly, noisy baby humans. Really.
No, I did NOT reproduce - that tells you how much I value babies.
Well, that doesn’t help my decision any; I don’t have any babies OR any pandas!
I find the idea of choosing a human baby over a panda appalling, when there are seven billion humans on the planet and we are doing our best to breed ourselves and every other species into extinction. Pandas might be an evolutionary dead-end, but at least they’re not going to take every other species down with them.
Jesus Christ, I think people are actually serious.
If rescue is incumbent upon me, that means the baby’s parents are not around, I would be thinking, if I save this baby, I might not be able to find its parents, so then I would be stuck with it. If I save the panda, I could just carry it to a nearby stand of bamboo and my work here is done, eighteen miserable years of my life saved.
I don’t think you understand how legal guardian/adoption laws work.
A better question may be, “after you have saved the baby would you risk your life to try and save the panda”?
It means no such thing. You seem to be adding to the hypothetical to defend your choice. As alluded to above, I believe that unless the people responding that they would save the panda are actual sociopaths (in which case maybe they’d save neither), they would save the human baby if the situation was actually upon them. The asinine responses in this thread suggesting it would actually be defensible to save the panda are stomach-churning, though, to be sure. And – most assuredly – no one who would save the panda has ever lost a child.
Well, I was all set to bite the bullet and vote to save the baby, but then I remembered the new endangered animal tax laws. You can actually get money from the government if you are involved with the preservation of any animals on the endangered list.
The panda will get me money, the baby would cost me money. Forget that, the economy is very hard right now.
The human baby, obviously. Sentimentality aside, there’s a decent chance that the baby human will someday grow up to be a productive member of society. And the baby panda? Huge infant panda mortality rate. You might save the little bastard over the human and still have the damn thing die on you.
But I still get the tax break.
Baby of course. And I get tons of tax breaks for my kid - the panda cannot use that as its only selling point.
I think they think they’re serious.
Name of Hermes! That can’t be real!
Will wonders never cease.
Much cuter than a panda.
And depending upon the child…
I don’t think you understand. FOP International (Friends of Pandas) makes a huge grant available to you from the Obama administration. You could have an entire bundle of drooling babies and they aint gonna net you the kind of scratch that panda can. Pandas rule, babies drool, I want that money.