Dum Pendebat Filius

John Tierney, in this NYT op-ed piece, seems to feel that if an animal can’t be anthropomorphized into an admirable person, it ain’t worth the trouble:

The rotund panda may be cuddlier [than the polar bear], but it is really more of a poster animal for gluttony and sloth. In the wild, it eats 12 hours a day and spends the rest of the time sleeping or hiding. In captivity, it can barely stir itself even to mate – Mei Xiang had to be artificially inseminated to produce her new cub at the National Zoo.

Yes, Mei Xiang can draw crowds to the zoo, but does her lolling inspire much zeal for preserving the species? The message she sends is, “I don’t care, so why should you?”

Polar bears are mammals with a mission, whether it’s Gus obsessively swimming in the Central Park Zoo, or the mother and her cub that I once followed during a dogsled expedition here in the Canadian high Arctic. We watched her with awe and kept our distance, especially after coming across the bloody remnants of her seal dinner on the ice. The message I took home was: “You mess with my habitat, and I’ll mess with you.”

The message I took home was: “You’re a pretty silly dude, J.T.”