Pandering to pandas.

Pubic lice are soon to be a thing of the past. At least in the western world. We are destroying their natural habitat. (I blame the South Americans, Brazilians in particular.) This isn't a joke, it's a fact. A creature, a living creature, soon to be wiped off the face of the earth by our intimate deforestation. It's happening now folks, so why have I not seen any "Adopt a crab" advertisements from the World Wildlife Fund? I bet they'd be far cheaper to adopt than a snow leopard, but I'd probably not request that they send me photo updates. Maybe it's because the advertising campaign posters wouldn't pass the censors? Perhaps.

So why are we not up in arms about this man-made devastation? Why aren't there armies of vegans marching up and down outside the head offices of Veet? Why aren't the manufacturers of lady-razors having nail bombs drop through their letterboxes? Could it be that none of us, not even the hippiest of hippies, give a shit? Or even that we're glad they're going? Perhaps.

We fight to save  the tiger from extinction. Only three thousand two hundred of these incredible creatures remain. (If you ask me, that's a LOT of fucking tigers) We're frantically attempting to get pandas to procreate. We have banned the portion of the African manufacturing industry responsible for gorilla-hand ashtrays. But the plight of the poor pubic lice gets no promotion.

Public lice aren't pretty, that's the problem. My son had a stuffed panda (If you ask me, pandas would be much less endangered if we'd all just stop stuffing them.) which he adored when he was a nipper.  He loved the Kellogs Frosties mascot, Tony the Tiger, who I'm sure you will agrrrree is grrrrrrrreat.  I can't for the life of me recall any Disney cartoon or breakfast cereal advertising campaign featuring a pubic louse. They didn't even get a mention in the blockbuster film "A Bugs Life". Surely that would've been the perfect vessel to raise awareness of their plight?

No. We're going to let them quietly slip away. One day the phrase "as dead as a dodo" will be usurped and replaced by "as passed-away as a pediculosis pubis". Perhaps.

As the lice expire the world will keep on turning, the tigers will keep on roaring and the pandas will keep on not fucking. And who will miss the poor crotch crab?

We fight to conserve. It's massive. And rightly so. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimate that upto one hundred and fifty species PER DAY become extinct. That's a lot of species. Shocking. The problem being that once people realise the vast majority of these species are insects people stop giving shits. Who cares?

Now here comes the part that's going to lose me even more Twitter followers than my Atheism admission. (See my last post, "Live forever or die trying") In my humble opinion we should let them all die. Tigers, pandas, pubic lice, lesser spotted cock hounds and unicorns. Balls to them. I'm not saying hunt them, in my opinion if you're not going to eat it then let it be. (The one exception to this being moths. I hate moths. And anyway, my mate Dave eats moths, its a macabre party trick, but it does mean that the murder of moths falls within the boundaries of my rule) But pandas, China's most lucrative export (Western zoos are literally renting those pandas) are endangered because they can't be arsed having sex. If a species is endangered because it can't be arsed having sex you can be sure that they've given up trying and just want out. Given the choice, would you rather become extinct or condemn your offspring to a life behind bars for the amusement of slack jawed, food-chain topping, environmental vandals?

Animals become extinct all on their own sometimes. It's nature. Sometimes, though, it's the fault of man that causes their extinction.

But hold on, aren't we part of the natural world too? We weren't assembled in a factory on a distant planet and sent here to terraform this dump and make it ready for the lizard people. And even if we were, where did the lizard people come from?

It is the greatest conceit of man to believe that he can somehow, through his own actions, destroy this beautiful planet to which we all cling. We can't. It's not possible. We might poison the planet, create a nuclear winter, hunt and farm our way to oblivion, but the Earth doesn't care. It'll let us die, it'll let every creature in existence die. It'll let every plant wither. It'll never go on TV and ask for just £3.99 a month to adopt a homosapien.

Then, after a million or a billion or a trillion years, a tiny green shoot will wriggle it's way out of the dry, barren soil, well fertilised by the decomposing bodies of the planets previous incumbents and it'll begin again.


Another million years will see another million species. Water will have become clean again by eons of natural filtration through rock and fish will swim in the new, clean seas. Maybe next time the fish will have the good sense to stay put. Maybe they won't. Maybe mammals will evolve. Maybe lizards will rise to the top of the food chain as they did all those millennia ago. Maybe insects will develop opposable thumbs and invent the door handle, enabling them to open a metaphorical door which leads to a massively successful race of super-intelligent lice. Lice who couldn't possibly make a bigger hash of the incredible gift they have been given than we did. Hopefully they'll never realise that by burning all of our fossilised remains they'll be able to get places quicker, die in crashes and choke their own atmosphere up.

And maybe those lice will prefer hairy genitalia, meaning that the tiny, pink mammals that colonised their pubes after they got drunk at an office party and cheated on their spouses with ANThony or BEEtrice will thrive.

Perhaps.

J2H.