Watch this Slate slideshow and you’ll come out hating pandas for everything they represent. While millions of dollars have gone into saving the last three thousand pandas just because they’re cute, at least one sorry creature—the aye-aye—is bound for extinction because it’s ugly. The aye-aye looks like a balding, emaciated gremlin. So even though it minds its own business in life, foraging for bugs in tree bark with claws bigger than its face, superstitious people in Madagascar go out of their way to kill it on sight. “Aye-aye, aye-aye,” indeed, as the maudlin Ranchero song goes,
“Canta y no llores.” The world is not fair. Not even environmental philanthropists are.
After pointing out injustice, fortunately, the writer poses solutions. Savvy conservationists can market the most charismatic creatures to raise money for the rest. The World Wildlife Federation already does so with its panda logo. “One lovable animal might stand in for an entire ecosystem—the jaguar, for example, could serve as a spokesmodel for the Amazon rainforest where it lived,” Michael Levitin writes. To summarize the argument of biologist David Stokes, conservationists “must understand the ways that aesthetic appeal can be used to motivate the public—and then try to promote the “less attractive” creatures by highlighting their most endearing feature.”
To their ideas I’d like to add another. Endangered wildlife t-shirts—the ones painted with blue whales underwater or gray wolves in the snow—went out of fashion by 1990. (I reluctantly retired mine some years later). But can’t you picture the aye-aye (or the golden-rumped elephant shrew or the hairy-eared dwarf lemur) becoming an icon emblazoned on ironic t-shirts to raise funds for their conservation? And not just for hipsters. The scrawny, bug-eyed Chihuahua mascot was fast food industry’s most effective ad campaign in decades; Americans bought 13 million stuffed ones from Taco Bell and far too many more dashboard bobble-heads. Paris Hilton has one too. And Sam the World’s Ugliest Dog ranks among this millennium’s most famous canines. Today the t-shirts and mugs made in Sam’s memory are sold out. So conservationists who want to draw attention to the less photogenic animals could make use of this trend: in the era of Ugly Betty, a beatific defense of homeliness itself may be garnering popularity.
—April Rabkin
