HispanicBusiness

A BBC Nature host is arguing that efforts to save the endangered panda bear from extinction aren't worth the cost.

Naturalist Chris Packham says although he loves pandas, he worries that society's obsession over saving the cuddly animal is coming at the expense of focusing on broader "biodiversity hotspots."

"It may well be that we can lose the cherries from the cake," he wrote in an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Guardian. "But you don't want to lose the substance. Save the Rainforest, or Save the Kalahari: that would be better."

If left to their own evolutionary devices, pandas -- which exist mainly in China -- wouldn't stand a chance, he said. The once-carniverous animals, he argued, now subsist on an herbavore diet that isn't nutritious, are susceptible to disease and for a long while refused to breed in captivity.

(In the recent past, scientists have treated male pandas to viagra, and panda couples to "panda porn", so flummoxed were they by this phenomenon.)

Packham notes that few people seem to care when an ugly animal called the Yangtze river dolphin -- which, like pandas, existed in China -- dies out.

Packham's column also struck an ominous note on the topic of climate change.

"Extinction is very much a part of life on earth," he wrote. "And we are going to have to get used to it in the next few years because climate change is going to result in all sorts of disappearances."

Not all naturalists agree with Packham's panda argument.

In a counterpoint column with The Guardian, Mark Wright, chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature, said that, contrary to Packham's argument, pandas are not an evolutionary dead-end.

"If we don't destroy their habitat, they will just chunter along in the same way that they have for the thousands of years," he wrote.

Wright added that pandas are also a useful poster child for an entire habitat.

"Look at Borneo, where you instantly think of the orang-utans. In the southern oceans, you think of the blue whale. Then there are polar bears in the north. There are things you pull out from the picture because people can relate to them. And it does make a difference."