Should We Pander to Pandas?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

home!

Hello, I'm Robin Entz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

On my left, a man who used to be that rarest of species, the disco scientist.

But now they're ten a penny.

You can barely get Richard Dawkins to mention God nowadays.

He's so busy either getting down low or bussing a wine with Melvin Bragg.

Sick man.

Yeah.

Look at me, I'm twerking.

It's Brian Cox.

What does bussing a wine mean?

We have no idea what bussing a wine means.

We were going to say bust a fat move with Richard Dawkins, but we realized that was probably very old language.

So we wrote to Radio One Extra.

Genuinely, we were like, Radio One Extra.

Brian Cox and I are both in our 40s.

We're not really sure what bust a fat move would be nowadays.

They wrote back saying you've spelt fat with an F.

We were immediately feeling foolish.

Anyway.

But apparently, this is what said: buss a wine.

Bus a wine.

So there we are, bus a wine.

Frank, bus a wine.

What is your definition?

And on my right, you will always find him in the kitchen at parties.

Great song, appropriately from the 1980s, that he's turned into a dress code.

It's Robinence.

Today we ask, is our love affair with the panda over?

And we should make it clear that when we say our,

we mean humanity, not just Robin and me.

We've not been keeping a panda in a secret love nest at

a licensed fee payer's expense, or at least we've submitted receipts for the bamboo and are therefore accountable.

Is conversation too often focused on the natural world's photogenic icons, or do polar bears and pandas provide an alluring gateway to a broader discussion about conservation?

Is there any real point in human intervention to save what, let's face it, are a few pretty useless animals when so much of our current civilization is defined by destruction?

Is there any way human progress will not be at odds with nature?

We have a panel to help us decide.

Simon Watt is a biologist, presenter of Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants, and a curator of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society.

He sees the goal as promoting diversity in ecosystems rather than focusing on the individual creature.

The winner of their most recent ugliest animal poll was the blobfish, an animal impossible to describe on radio.

If you haven't seen the blobfish, basically it looks like the closing down sale of a candle shop, right?

It is just the most...

Sandy Knapp is a plant taxonomist and head of life sciences plant division at the Natural History Museum.

On her latest trip to Brazil, she discovered five new species of plant and says that discovering a new species is better than having sex.

The only thing that tops it is discovering a new plant while having sex.

As I know from a time when I was courting a triffid.

Anyway.

Sarah Pasco is a comedian, writer, and also a bear trapper, big game hunter and ivory collector.

I'd like to apologise for this, Sarah.

By the way, we know that you're none of those things, but the BBC said for balance, we had to say that you were.

As well as killing animals, she

is also a vegan.

That's the only bit that's true.

As Sarah says, I never eat them, I just like to shoot them to see their faces.

And this is our panel.

Simon, we'll start with you.

Now, first of all, I mean, imagine, I want you to imagine, a world without pandas.

How would society change?

China would change a lot.

Like a panda, wait for wit, is China's most expensive export.

So pandas are big business.

That's one of the strange things to get your head around.

They've got a kind of monochrome charisma, which meant that we just love them.

The reason why that's the WWF's logo, and this isn't a joke, this is genuinely serious, is because it's black and white.

It saved them so much money in photocopying.

That is honestly one of the reasons they picked it.

But the reason why I suppose I found it interesting is because its greatest evolutionary advantage was that it does happen to look like a teddy.

And that is the thing which has ensured its survival.

What we're doing effectively is the cult of celebrity in the wild, in species.

The next thing we have to look at when we think of pandas is that they are expensive.

You know, they're the charismatic megafauna.

They cost an awful, awful lot.

WWF, they're not stupid.

They know exactly what they're doing.

This is a poster boy, and it's a poster boy that works.

So, although they're using the panda as the way to grab the attention, they're actually using it to conserve the bamboo forests in China.

And through doing that, they're conserving the red panda and a whole host of other species.

Well, as you say, it's quite a the figures here, it costs £700,000 per year to keep a panda in a zoo, and of that, about £630,000 or so goes to the Chinese government.

So, it's rental, panda rental, it's really expensive.

But, as you say, they use that money to conserve the panda habitat because it's such a valuable export.

So joking aside, it's not a bad thing to conserve and promote and a way of generating money in order to conserve a habitat in China.

We could take us a bit further because if we are going to start thinking that it is only famous because of how it looks, then that gets a bit patronising.

And the threat of it.

I don't know.

I think it's fine by me.

I'm not 700 grand a year, by the way, to the license fee payer.

Let me just make sure.

Though he is sometimes taken to Edinburgh Zoo to try and impregnate, but you don't need to know about this.

That's why he dyes the hair.

Anyway, Sandy,

give it a black and white look.

I would just rather that we appeal to minds instead of just hearts, because

we're missing and we're glossing over the extent of the problem in the world as it is.

If we think that 200 species are going extinct every single day, I'd rather protect some of the things that are either useful or the things that we haven't even seen yet.

Sandy, I was going to, you're obviously involved in the world of plants, where, of course, there are plants in danger as well.

We're talking here about predominantly animals, but how do you think we could entice people to also realize the importance of that element of biodiversity?

Well, the thing about plants is that people think of them as not behaving because they do things on a very different time scale to us.

And one of the things about vertebrates is that they do things on basically exactly the same time scale as us, because we can kind of understand what's happening.

They kind of saunter along and stuff, and insects go fast or slow and freak people out.

But plants sort of just sit there.

But if anyone's ever seen David Attenborough's Life of Plants and seen the bramble speed it up, plants behave in all kinds of ways.

They turn towards the sun, they grow, they do all sorts of things.

And I think it's a question of thinking about it as an integrated whole.

So I always try to describe the forest is sort of the fabric in which everything else is.

And I mean, in a way, we kind of have it with the Amazon.

The Amazon is like the panda.

We all think the Amazon rainforest is absolutely fantastic, and the Amazon rainforest is absolutely fantastic.

But there's lots of other habitats on Earth which are equally fantastic.

And

it's like kind of trying to say which of your children do you love the most?

Which is almost impossible.

If you really sat down and said, okay, I'm going to cull one of these kids.

Maybe that's what it is, because it seems to me like actually this way of developing things is because this is the way to get most money out of people.

So rather than saying this amount of species are going extinct every day, which seems like too big a problem, or all of these habitats, you focus on one thing and it seems doable.

It's like saying you have to kill one of your children because you've got 16 million children, and suddenly I don't care that much.

I'm entirely with Sir Her because actually, this is something that's, whenever we have debates about this kind of stuff, has come up an awful lot.

But the thing is, the people who are going to have their hearts convinced are already convinced.

They're on our sides.

So we need to have the data for this stuff.

We have to understand the information so we can convince corporations and politicians because they're the people who are really going to make the difference.

But even more so, hearts are not always the best way to view it.

Funny, Brian and I, we've been fighting about this backstage because I hate cats.

Cats are rubbish because they're an ecological disaster.

Like at least 30 species.

And pandas, your cards are on the table.

I have never heard such a deafening dear radio four in my head as I've just heard at that point.

But we can see there that that's an emotion thing.

We like pets because we've evolved to be like this.

We are a social animal, therefore we apply social animal laws to other animals.

It doesn't mean it's good for the planet.

No.

So I have something like you, and it's very unpopular to say because I really don't dislike cats.

Obviously, if one was to walk in, I would stroke it and think it was lovely.

But I'm against domestication.

And I think, I probably think that it's better to be extinct than in a zoo.

But I wonder, because you brought that up as well, and when I originally just scribbled down the question, why are you a vegan?

Brian went, you can't ask that, because I know that you'll normally ask it like this: Why are you a vegan?

Eat this sausage roll, but I don't mean it like that.

First of all, I tried it as an experiment, and I have to say that underlying all of it is a selfish thing.

That if I found being a vegan difficult or it made me feel ill, I would have stopped.

And I had the exact opposite.

I became so full of energy all of a sudden, rather than the opposite, which is what you'd expect.

And suddenly, my digestion was so much better.

So, that's what's kept me doing it.

So, I have to say that, first of all, I'm not this martyr, miserable every day, crying into my hummus.

I'm sprightly enough.

Then you can't eat it, can you?

Because then it's got animal product in it.

Oh, I've ruined my own hummus with my own tears.

Self-cannibalism of the music.

But I guess when I think about animals, and I think I have exactly the same feelings towards humans, I'm just trying to respect life as much as possible.

I think, I probably think that it's better to be extinct than in a zoo.

Sandy,

we're talking about conservation.

Could you just, you mentioned the Amazon rainforest.

Could you just set out the scale of the problem in terms of habitat destruction in terms of why we should be concerned?

Well, so it depends on where you are.

So I worked for a while in Paraguay, in the Chaco of Paraguay, which is not the Amazon, it's a dry forest.

And so it's an area that's full of spines and people call it the green hell, but it's absolutely fascinating.

And it was one of the places where a new mammal species was discovered quite recently, this kind of large peccary.

And in the Chaco, an area, seven football pitches, is being deforested every day.

So pretty soon it's going to be completely gone,

which is

actually terrible.

It's terrible to think that all of that won't be there anymore.

So there are a half a million species of flowering plants, and we depend upon between eight and ten for eighty percent of our caloric intake.

So, we really don't use very much of the rest of the diversity of life on earth.

But I kind of think that that's what feeds the human imagination.

So, that's where poetry comes from, and novels, and

our imagination as humans comes from the diversity of life around us.

Simon, it's interesting to explore that further.

There are two ways you can argue about conservation.

We've touched on them both.

One is from an emotional standpoint or an aesthetic standpoint, or just the self-evident statement, I suppose, that it would be sad if this animal or this plant were lost forever.

But then there's the practical point about biodiversity and what it really means for us practically.

Yeah, I guess because both of them do matter.

I think Margaret Atwood put it very, very well.

She said, if you want to save the planet, then you must love it.

And I think she's onto something there, which is where inspiring species do come in.

They've got a role to play.

It's half the reason why we should just talk a bit more of them, actually.

Study biology more so you can see how inspiring the stuff that isn't initially interesting is.

But there's so much practicality.

So the UN made an estimate back in 2008, I think it was, and they say that threats to our biodiversity are now a bigger threat to international business than terrorism.

Trillions of dollars.

So for a start, you get these things called ecosystem services, which is a very ephemeral, dodgy kind of viewpoint.

But basically means you cut down trees in a certain area, then you're eventually going to have flooding because they're not keeping the water out of there.

There's a valley in China where they realized this.

They worked out roughly the economic cost of so many people dying and flooding every year, which sounds like a very harsh way of doing it, but it works, believe me.

And they just decided we're not going to deforest that hillside anymore.

So there's that kind of aspect.

So then you've got the aspect of things like pollinators.

I'm sure we've all heard in the news about all the issues that there are with bees.

Flies are more common pollinators than bees and things.

All the tiny little workers of the world, all the things that recycle dead stuff, stuff, they really, really matter.

And it's going to have major impacts on us.

Because this is what we really have to focus on.

What we have to appreciate here is that we are not going to be able to save everything.

We have to look now where we can get the most biology for our buck.

And there's so many cures and things.

Again, there's an estimate by the US Cancer Research Institute that 70% of current anti-cancer promising drugs come from rainforest plants.

So that's only one environment and plants.

We would have to make sure that we're not.

I think what you need to preserve is a dynamic planet, because the planet has been changing.

It's changing under our feet.

I mean, it's changing now.

You know, things are changing and all the little bacteria that are under the carpet are kind of multiplying and dividing and changing.

And the bacteria that's in our gut is changing.

And so, in a way, what we need to conserve

is a planet that will be able to kind of sustain life, and arguably perhaps our life, you know, if we're going to be selfish about it, but that's what species are, is they're basically selfish about things, is we need to preserve a dynamic planet.

And that doesn't mean having one of this and one of this and one of this and one of this.

It's not like a shop where you can have each of these things.

It's more like you need to have a shop where you can go in and get lots of different stuff and that it all can help you live.

Well, that's an interesting and rather less sentimental view of conservation, isn't it?

Because conservation to many people, I think, will be, well, the polar bears or the pandas or whatever.

As you said, the fluffy animals.

But what you're really saying is that that

life changes, species come and go, they always have done.

It's a very good thing that the dinosaurs were wiped out for us 60-odd million years ago.

So you're essentially making the case that what we need to preserve is the ability of the biosphere.

So, I mean, in kind of big words, it's evolutionary potential.

So, I mean, places where, I mean, I've been lots of places collecting plants and looking at things.

And I mean, there are some groups of plants that I've studied recently, like the wild relatives of the tomatoes, for example.

There's some of them you can't really figure out what the species are because they're still becoming species.

They're still changing and they interbreed and it's complicated and messy.

So people often ask me as a taxonomist, okay, what are you going to do?

You're going to name everything and then you can go home and have tea.

But it's not like that.

It's not like you can have a list of everything because it's, in a way, it's an idea about how all of that variation, which is generated by natural selection, among many other things, how that can be parceled up and how we can talk about it.

And the only reason to name anything is to be able to talk about it, really.

And yet, isn't perhaps the problem that it's very hard to engage people at all in this?

I mean, Sarah, people will cry.

They'll cry if, you know, a hairy biker's voted off strictly come dancing.

They'll cry when the butler in Downton Abbey loses his leg to a ham slicer, whatever it might be.

And then, but actually, how do we engage in a much more important and far more tragic than an actor miming the loss of a leg?

Well, I think that's the thing.

I think actually we have to acknowledge how selfish we are, and how actually, if our life seems unaffected by what else is going on, as in our physical generation, our own children, I don't think, I'm maybe just talking for myself, maybe I can't talk for everybody, but I don't think people care that much, or there isn't that much space in their day-to-day lives to care.

Actually, this is another problem we have, is that most of the conservation movement is deeply anti-human.

There's a general thing of animals good, humans bad.

Okay.

Now,

I care about humans because most of my friends are humans.

I actually think again that maybe perhaps some of the ways of addressing some of the world's biggest conservation problems are dealing with some of the best human problems.

But humans are actually a really important part of a dynamic Earth.

So let's think about the Amazon rainforest.

We all think of it as being completely untouched and pristine.

But in fact, there's lots and lots of evidence that humans have been in the rainforest, altering it, doing things to it, ever since they first arrived there between 10 and 30,000 years ago.

Not that long ago.

So nomadic tribes would bring a species from somewhere else, so they would...

Well, we're a weed.

I mean, we're just a weed.

We're like the Japanese knotweed of the mammal kind of

great.

Because, I mean, if you think, what do weeds do?

They spread out and they take everything over.

You know, a bind weed in your garden smothers everything and kills it.

And that's exactly what we as a species have done.

We're a weed.

Simon, I'm interested in the argument that we've kind of skirted around that it's in our

self-interest to protect diversity in particular.

It would appear to be that more diverse ecosystems tend to be more stable.

So they're not ones that go comput as easy.

Even ones that seem to have more parasites actually seem to be more stable.

Also, the more species you have out there, the more of that biochemistry there is, the more natural things that there are to plumb and to act as resources.

So preserving the wild equivalents of things like the potato gives you diversity that you can use.

And again, we have to perhaps choose what we're going to do.

So one of my favourite conservation schemes, I really love these guys, they're based at London Zoo, and it's called the Edge of Existence Campaign.

And Edge stands for Evolutionarily Distinct, Globally Endangered.

And they're effectively trying to catalogue life and work out where there's the most interesting stuff.

What species is weird and has nothing else like it?

And that's focused on preserving.

It's preserving evolutionary diversity.

So if you

think of all of life as a tree, what you want to preserve is as many branches as you possibly can and not just one bit of the trunk.

I mean, if you want a tree in your garden, that's what you want, is you want something that's nice and symmetrical and looks good rather than something that has one wonky branch out here.

And how well well have we characterized or enumerated these branches?

Because I know you were just in Brazil and came back after the expedition with five new species of plant.

So plants are relative, mammals are extremely well known, there's about 5,000 of them.

Birds are also extremely well known.

There's only about 9,000 of them.

I mean, vertebrates, we know lots of, because there aren't very many of them, and we like them a lot, and so people study them a lot.

Plants are also, funnily enough, quite well known.

There's probably about

anywhere between a quarter and a half a million species.

And so

if you do the maths, if you do all these calculations, we have 20% left to discover, which is why it's really exciting when you find something that you think is new.

So do you experience it?

There's the wonderful line when Charles Darwin was, I think, first in the Brazilian rainforest on the Voyage of the Beagle, and he talked about that, the chaos of delight he experienced.

He was bombarded by so much nature and he so many things that hadn't been imagined.

And do you have those moments where you go, I'm experiencing a chaos of delight?

We have found a thing that people didn't know existed.

Walking somewhere that you've never been before is absolutely amazing.

I mean, it's amazing to walk somewhere and you look at things and you think, I kind of know what that is and I know what that is, but man, I've never seen anything like that before.

And that's a great thing about studying plants is they sit there and wait for you to kind of walk into them and say, yeah, you're new.

But it is really exciting.

And we're very specialized.

I mean, all science is incredibly specialized now.

So no one is like...

Darwin was or Alfred Russell Wallace, who kind of did a bit of everything.

I mean, we're all incredibly specialized.

And I'm a specialist on the plant family that includes potatoes and tomatoes and things.

Do you feel bad when you eat them?

No.

No, I don't.

I don't feel bad at all.

I don't feel bad in the slightest.

Does it feel like work?

No.

No, it just feels like eating tomatoes.

There is a wonder to it.

There is a wonder to it.

And I can see how Darwin felt, you know, when first confronted with this amazing diversity.

I know people, you know, you get the chaos of delight and everything, but fundamentally it's often working in really, really hard places.

So I remember once I was in Borneo going through the jungle, oh, this is amazing.

And then I was there at night, and I just wished that nature would shut up so I could get some sleep.

So, you do get both.

Same way, I've got a friend who discovered a whole new species because I bit him.

He wasn't really enamoured with it.

I mean, you see, we can argue, I suppose, that this kind of disconnection from the natural world is a modern thing.

When did this idea of conservation emerge?

Because you certainly look back to the

1920s, 1913, 1920.

I mean, the charity that I work with, Fauna and Flora International, started out as the Wildlife Preservation Society, which was about keeping places in Africa for big game hunters.

But people saw quite clearly that it was really important to conserve diversity for a very utilitarian purpose.

But this is a 20th century.

It's a 20th century phenomenon.

It was a philosophical issue as well, of actually a lot of this.

So the dodo, we think, went extinct in 1662.

And it was then 15 years before we noticed it had gone extinct.

And it was 200 years before we recognized it.

Because at that point, they thought only God creates and destroys.

They thought it was impossible that something as small as mankind could have an impact on the world.

Well, what about the passenger pigeon, which is one of the most famous ones, which is what the beginning of the 20th century is?

The rest of the shock.

But they were just an enormous number of those, weren't there?

And then it just seemed that because of whether it was fashion or hunger, so often they go together, as you will have seen in Paris catwalks.

But

these things, they suddenly just almost entirely, well, and then they became extinct.

Well, the passenger pigeon was apparently so common because that was one of these bounce back things after the decimation of the native inhabitants of North America who had kept them under control and they just kind of went and exploded.

You just sparked something in my head there actually because we were thinking of yeah things going extinct without even noticing.

If the passenger pigeon went extinct, its parasites went extinct.

There's a whole ecosystem associated with every species.

Yeah, but there's only one that's recognized as it's the pygmy hog sucking mouse.

It's the only internationally recognized endangered species.

We've actually added to it recently because we've discovered that,

this is amazing, that

the pubic louse is going extinct because,

yeah, you guessed it, because of so many people having Brazilians.

They're losing their habitats.

That is a genuine reason.

See, I would imagine you would be able to do a campaign to save that, though, because the kind of pin-up version.

Anyway, that doesn't matter.

That's the kind of very nuts and deep.

Is that one we're going to save or one we're going to let you?

I'm all for saving things for the sake of the correct.

Does it offer anything to the biodiversity?

Well, it will do.

Will it really?

It will be interconnected with other things.

Because again, there'll be things that feed on that.

We've never found any form of cellular life which does not have viruses in it.

The point that there's a chaotic nature

to the ecosystem.

Wasps, for example.

A lot of people say, I don't like wasps.

I'd love to get rid of the wasps.

They seem to serve no useful purpose.

Wasps are brilliant.

That's a great example.

Think of the fig wasp.

We would not have figs if it weren't for a type of wasp.

We'd not have that fruit.

The entire garden would be eaten up by caterpillars without wasps.

That's the thing.

I got really bored of ecology at school, which is really something bad to admit as a biologist, but it was because you could sum up all answers with everything's connected.

And it's because it kind of is.

Now, we're also wrong to think that there is a natural Gaia-like order.

It is chaos.

There might be some.

The worst phrase ever invented was the balance of nature.

Yeah, because some things would would progress to a monoculture, and that's not necessarily good either.

If it weren't for elephants, Africa would be covered with forests because they farm it.

They knock down trees deliberately to try and keep the stuff they eat.

But we're not talking about preserving some kind of idealistic status quo, are we?

We're not saying that Africa looks like that now, therefore that's what it should look like, whatever should mean.

But that's kind of what happens.

I mean, in a way, that's the problem.

So the problem is the word conservation.

Because the word conservation implies something that's static.

You know, if you conserve a building, you keep it the way it was.

So conservation, in a way, in the English language, is this really horrible word.

I'd like to preserve a dynamic earth.

An earth with the capacity for change.

An earth with the capacity for change, which is like having money in the bank.

There is a strain of argument which says, who are we to make a choice, what lives and what dies?

But I suppose that's just practically the way that it is and will be for the foreseeable future.

I think it's better to make the choice than just let it happen or also let it happen through our own ignorance, which is effectively what's happening.

We haven't studied the world well enough to know where can we get the best investment.

And we don't actually know even all the different ways that we're causing harm.

And would you agree with the general point that we, because we can, we have to manage the planet, the ecosystem.

And we have to manage it actively and we have to choose.

It's not a case of leave these things alone, leave the natural world alone.

Well, I think that we've gone beyond that.

Our population growth and our kind of use of our Japanese knotweed tendencies have taken us beyond that.

I was going to say, Sarah, are you comfortable with that idea?

Because it's quite a challenging idea that we've gone beyond the point of being able to step back.

It's strange, it makes me think of Noah.

That's what it makes me think about.

And I guess what you're describing is: okay, so a flood is coming, like, this is terrible, what's happening, it's too late, you can't change it.

And what we're currently doing is setting up an ark.

Let's pick some really fertile, biodiverse areas and protect them from the rain.

And hopefully, that will

do in this terrible scenario.

Do you know, we don't have enough use of Bible stories to illustrate science.

I really did think about

the first time on.

No, no, no, it was good.

I enjoyed it because we're always getting complaints about that.

You know, normally we sometimes use the Apocrypha, but apparently that's not even in the book.

Anyway, but it's like, Simon, you've got, I mean, in terms of, we were talking at the beginning about the use of the panda as a kind of honey trap to ideas, and you have the Ugly Animal Preservation Society as a way of kind of wooing people into realizing it's not just the cuddly, it's not just the orangutan.

And, you know, and I think you have got, the reason we have this big screen here is you're going to show us, I believe, the great radio

great radio.

Brilliant.

And Sarah's going to describe what they look like.

Because, yeah, so if we can, so these are, now, as we said, in fact, the poll that you did this year, the blobfish,

was number one.

Now we're just going to go, is it just monkeys?

We did a request, actually.

So what we do is we're basically a comedy night that got out of hand because we had a serious message behind it.

And it was two real purposes.

One was to get people talking about species that we don't talk about.

And the other bit was to have some fun with it.

Because, as I say, conservation is depressing.

You know, you open up a newspaper, you're just checking what's died today.

That's the kind of thing.

So, they've asked me to put together, pick what I thought were six particularly interesting ugly monkeys.

And yeah, can we stick on the first one?

Can we just, and you, as an audience, by the way, have to and are at the correct point?

We will do this in the standard way that we do at our ugly animal comedy nights.

So, we basically try for democracy and conservation.

We're going to get you to scream as loud as you can at the end for your vote for what's going to be the official mascot, the kind of anti-panda.

So, Sarah, what's this first one here?

I think ugliness is subjective because I think it's a very attractive monkey.

He looks a little bit, I used to work in Lanzarote as a club rep.

He's got a little red, sunburned face, very soulful brown eyes, a downturned mouth with a very, it's like a call an adolescent moustache, and the rest of his body is covered with luscious red hair.

So, Sarah's been very kind because this is the bald hair to do a carrier.

It's got a bright red face, probably probably because it's embarrassed, I think.

It's a beautiful monkey from the Amazon.

They can leap like six meters in a single bind.

They're pretty incredible.

So that's fine.

Let's see the next one then.

The proboscis monkey.

Well, I'll say again.

You know the actor Owen Wilson?

No, no, I'm going.

So basically, he once said in an interview, and I thought it was very interesting when people get insecure about themselves, he said that he's got this unattractive, kind of broken nose, and he thinks the reason women find him sexy is subconsciously it reminds you of a penis.

So let's have a look at this proboscis.

Yeah, I mean,

question sound about that because that nose, I mean, is that sexual selection?

Is that what we know?

So, the guy, this is the proboscis monkey is named after its nose.

In Borneo, they called the Dutch monkey because they thought it looked like the Dutch colonisers, honestly.

Because not only has it got an enormous nose, but it's also got a big pot belly.

It feeds mostly in leaves and things, so it's basically just full of fart.

We can't break them down so well, it's got bacteria and things to do instead.

And yeah, we think that that's probably sexual selection, and it might even be involved in their big honking calls.

So, the bigger your hooter, the louder you can hoot, so to speak.

Let's have the next monkey then,

right?

Now, Sarah, remembering that this show goes out at 4:30 on a Monday, describe what you can see.

Well, we've got a monkey.

Now, I'm gonna say Nicki Minaj.

Stay with my

because this monkey has got a booty, and all the other monkeys are looking at it.

So, because so monkeys, a big swollen red bottom is a sign of fertility, is it?

Or being receptive to males?

Yeah, it's one.

So every 33 to 36 days, this is a crest of black macaque or a Silhouese macaque.

That just balloons like a massive...

It's like a whoopie cushion or something, isn't it?

And whenever it does that, it's just just saying, come get me, boys.

That's the idea.

Yeah.

So it's not actually properly ugly, it's only from this angle.

Let's have the next monkey then.

Oh, again, I think you've got this lovely look.

Here's a lovely monkey.

So it's like, so sometimes girls in, not just girls, men and women can have kind of tiny designer dogs in their handbag.

So this looks like a small, scared, black-faced dog in a white, fluffy handbag.

He looks like a very angry dog in a white handbag.

Well, he would be.

He's dressed up as Santa.

Yoga dressed up as Santa, yeah.

That's exactly.

I think he's nice.

And what's that one telling you?

This is a Brazilian bare-faced tamarind.

And it's again, it's pretty cool.

It's got an amazing social system.

It runs what we know as a reverse harem because there's an alpha female and she controls all the mating rights.

But we think this might be perhaps the most endangered primate in the Amazon, that kind of area.

I'm interested with species that have one woman.

Are they more peaceful than other species, or do they fight?

No, they're they're all over the place.

So it's like everything.

In baboon societies,

it tends to be that dominance is asserted by the males by fighting.

And in females, dominance is asserted by alliances.

So males are more likely to fight between one and two.

The females are more likely to all pile on and beat up one girl.

So it varies entirely from species to species.

Lanserati.

Yeah, that's a single.

See, the final end, your final monkey of choice.

Oh, no.

What's this one, Simon?

If you can spend this time, it's honking snub-nosed monkey.

We actually thought this one was extinct until they rediscovered them in 1989, and there's only 200 to 250 of them.

All these species are endangered, I should point out.

It's not just that they're ugly, they're all on the way out.

It looks like a character from the League of Gentlemen.

Top five monkeys, let's have a look.

So, the audience, by level of screaming, let's find out.

Vote for the Yurukaya, the ball-faced Yurakaya.

Let's go for the next one.

The proboscis monkey.

Next one, the Sluezi Macap.

Next one, the Brazilian Bearsbash Car.

Surely.

Next one, and the Tonkin Smog Month Monkey.

There we are, that's the winner.

The people of Smoothen.

There we are.

Right.

The Tonkin.

But you said, I mean, the serious point is, you said there are only 200 of those.

Yeah, 200 to 250.

Mainly in zoos or in the wild?

Do you know what?

I don't know.

I don't think that there's many in zoos, if there's any, actually.

There's none, are there?

I think

they're from

an area in Sierra.

They're in Vietnam, these ones actually.

In Vietnam.

They're the largest primate in Vietnam.

So

that's the reason why we do our comedy now is because, yeah, nobody's heard about these things and they're wonderful.

And again, we tend to think, well, dolphins sorted, pandas sorted.

And it's much, much bigger than that.

But I find those things are like magic eye pictures, because animals that you are told are ugly, whether they are a red-lipped batfish, whether they are a blobfish, whatever they might be, the more you kind of look at them, the more you just think the incredible, you know, how mutation, heredity, natural selection has, you know, that's where this has currently ended up in that shape with those crazy eyes, that bizarre nose, whatever it might be.

And to me, there is an even greater delight than going, oh, you can see why that's ended up like that.

When you look at something, you go, why on earth?

What would be the point of that nose?

All beetles are like that.

All beetles are inexplicable.

Aren't they?

Basically, you look at them and you go, what on earth?

You've just said inexplicable on a science program, Brian Fox.

What has happened to me?

It is generally true.

If you look at beetles, you think, well, how did it get to be like that?

There are innate remarkable things, aren't they?

I know it's evolution.

I know the bloody answer.

Say there is a lot of them.

It's just God.

The reason why we did this...

Spoiler alert!

Spoiler alert!

The reason why we did that was because we thought conservation shouldn't be above a bit of satire.

And like, I don't think there's anything ugly more than just, but we choose to be ugly.

But we did get proper hate mail from like four-year-olds, and what was incredible is there's so many people telling me off from bullying the animals that because they were all still at primary school, they still signed all the hate mail with love.

It was really quite hard.

Also, most hate mail we get doesn't then get age after it, but I imagine.

So, we asked the audience a question: which animal would you happily see become extinct and why?

Howard says the ptarmigan or potarmigan.

So, no one has to figure out how to pronounce its name.

Squirrel, either the grey or the red, doesn't matter.

Lions, because they're so smug.

Foxes to annoy the countryside of lions.

Seagulls, I've been pooed on them three times.

Now it's personal.

That's from Dale.

Spiders, they scare my girlfriend who wakes me up at night to rehome them.

Re-home them, how lovely.

Hello,

I'm going to re-home that.

So, there we are.

Those are your answers.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to our panel, Sandy Knapp, Sarah Pasco, and Simon Watt.

Next week is the final in the series, and we are science communication.

What's the point?

So, thank you very much for listening, and goodbye.

That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

What do you think?

It should be more than 15 minutes.

Shut up, it's your fault.

You downloaded it.

Anyway, there's other scientific programs also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alca-Seltzer.

Life Scientific.

There's Adam Brother Fiddy's dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

That's Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Richard Hammond's sister, thank you very much, Brian.

And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.