Wang Wang and Fu Ni are expensive and useless | Peter Goers

Pandas are the stupidest animals on earth, are too expensive to keep and probably hate it here anyway, writes Peter Goers.

Journalist Simon Royal is a wag. He’s often said, “Why do I want to go and look at Pandas? If I want to look at something with dark rings under its eyes, something that doesn’t eat enough fibre and almost never has sex, I can stay home and look in the mirror,”

And so say all of us.

But we continue to pander to pandas and the Chinese Government for which they are a cash cow.

Every panda is worth $US100m.

The disappointing Wang Wang and Fu Ni cost SA a cool $1m a year in rent.

The desultory Adelaide Zoo was extensively redeveloped at vast expense to create a panda palace and a new entrance and underused convention and function centre.

The beautiful historic tessellated brick entrance on From Road was closed.

Have Wang Wang and Fu Ni been worth all this?

They failed to breed which is not unusual.

TELL US WHY IN THE COMMENTS

The panda Bao Bao failed to mate with three different partners in 30 years at the Berlin Zoo.

Maybe, like a lot of animals, Wang Wang and Fu Ni are same-sex attracted and good for them. Maybe Wang Wang’s wang has erectile dysfunction.

Maybe, Wang Wang and Fu Ni just can’t stand one another.

Part of the problem may be that they sit around all day on refrigerated rocks.

This would kill the sex drive of most of us and give us piles.

Perhaps our pandas just don’t like the Adelaide Zoo?

Maybe they’ll bonk like rabbits when they get home to China? Good luck to them.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang has promised us two more “beautiful and adorable” pandas and he announced that an SA delegation will be sent to China to go panda shopping.

That’s a great junket. Could the next pandas please be black, white and teal?

Do we get to name the new replacement pandas?

We only have Wang Wang and Fu Ni because of a dinner party at Carole Whitelock and Ken Irvin’s house in 2008.

The then zoo director Chris West was a guest together with the then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and his wife, Nicky.

At that dinner Downer promised to be a panda purveyor and was as good as his word.

We could call the new pandas Alex and Nicky or Carole and Ken or name them Claudia and Cream after the prominent Chinese-SA lawyer or perhaps Crows and Abject Failure.

Panda diplomacy continues a generation later as Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Premier Peter Malinauskas and China's Premier Li Qiang confirm that a disinterested Wang Wang, back right, is about to be traded out. Picture: NewsWire / Asanka Ratnayake / POOL

What about Dim and Sim?

Pandas are beautiful but boring.

They do only three things - loll, chomp bamboo and sleep.

I know people like that but they don’t cost us $1m a year.

Pandas are useless and the most stupid animals on earth.

As a species they destroy their own habitat by eating it and they have only been kept from extinction by human intervention and coddling.

Horrifyingly, if a panda gives birth to two cubs she immediately kicks one away to perish. Panda handlers rescue the cub and rotate it under the mother and she is too stupid to know she is really suckling two cubs.

Pandas breed rarely and Wang Wang and Fu Ni have been immune to the charms of their love shack with panda porn provided.

Failure Wang Wang during the Chinese Premier’s too the Adelaide Zoo as it was announced he was soon to be replaced. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Pandas are carnivorous but, like a lot of humans, can’t be bothered eating meat.

They are too lazy to catch prey.

They make sloths look hyperactive.

Pandas are crepuscular - most active at dawn and dusk - just when the zoo is closed.

And they are spectacularly boring to watch and they are often just as bad tempered as the Chinese Government which owns them.

Our health and education system is desperate for funds yet we throw money at boring pandas.

Wang Wang and Fu Ni have never been ramped.

Our zoo is shockingly expensive to visit and, arguably, not worth it. It is an animal prison wherein animals are bred and traded for incarcerated servitude. Zoos keep animals in cages for our assumed enjoyment.

The Adelaide Zoo would be better if it were returned to parklands and free native animals.

Meanwhile bored people gawp at bored and boring pandas which, like so much in our society and economy, are made in China.