(August 14, 2014 at 10:23 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: So a little bit of research and I found out that giant panda's numbers are increasing in the wild. Apparently the high costs associated with them deal with keeping and breeding Pandas that are in captivity. The cost of saving them in the wild should be no more than the cost of preserving their natural habitat, which shouldn't be more than any other species. So if the question about whether or not Zoos should spend so much on their Panda programs is different than whether or not we (or the Chinese government) should preserve wild Pandas. I think they are worth keeping in the wild.
Actually, giant panda numbers in the wild wouldn't have increased were it not for huge captive breeding facilities in china that are breeding zoo pandas, artificially training baby pandas for wild life skills, and releasing these human bred and human trained pandas back into the wild.
A reason why this level of conservational bioengineering is possible is because publicity generated by pandas in zoos.
