Panda Babies, TV review: These poor bears are the Carol Thatcher of the animal world

Telly vet Steve Leonard took a trip around a panda orphanage in China, and revealed that pandas usually give birth to twins, but dump one

Grin and bear it: vet Steve Leonard travelled to China in ‘Panda Babies’

With their cute faces and paunchy bodies, bumbling their way through a life of not doing very much, not even making love sweet love, pandas are, literally, the pin-up bears of the conservation movement. They are the logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature, or whatever it's called now, and they are synonymous with "endangered species", eclipsing even elephants and tigers, and leaving ugly buggers like the naked mole-rat and Seychelles giant flightless darkling beetle struggling for media coverage and public sympathy. They call pandas "charismatic" species in eco circles, and you can see why.

However, according to telly vet Steve Leonard's trip round a panda orphanage in China in Panda Babies, they aren't as nice as they look. For panda mums follow a Thatcheresque approach to child rearing. Pandas usually give birth to twins, but dump one in order to lavish all their love and attention on the other (ask Carol Thatcher how that felt). The big drawback for this "abandoned cub" policy is that half the potential future population of panda bears is culled at birth. So, with only about 1,600 left in the world, we humans have to intervene.

Hence the orphanage and its institutions of pandamonium, where they milk pandas, wipe their furry little bottoms, and keep the weaklings in intensive care incubators that would shame some Beijing maternity wards.

I couldn't help noticing, though, that the baby pandas were all living in cages with concrete floors, and the entire enterprise, though admittedly better than the alternative of widespread pandicide, was a bit unnatural. To be fair, they do, eventually, get released into the forest. In the anthropomorphic spirit of the current wave of TV nature documentaries, I think I did glimpse some glimmers of joy as, though born doomed, they became free, free as the wind blows and as the bamboo grows.

It isn't the pandas' inept reproductive techniques and fussy eating that have left them almost wiped out; there used to be loads of them all over what is now China. No, we are their misfortune: human development and loss of habitat. It is as if some alien species had arrived in the British Isles and appropriated so much of our land that the few of us left would be confined to bits of Rutland, and not even joined-up bits of Rutland at that, with a few sent off to zoos to be gawped at and pitied for their pathetic attempts at mating. Poor old pandas: mugged by humans and, worse, now mercilessly patronised by them. No wonder they seem like they can't be arsed.

When I arrived at university I was intrigued by chatter about what I assumed was some sort of secret society. You see, within a few days of arriving people were asking if I wanted to join what sounded like a Star Wars cult, religious sect or possibly one of those "dining societies" where a dead pig's head is a focus for fun. I soon discovered, though, that "The Kwa" was just a bunch of posh churchy types singing hymns.

As a faith based-activity requiring some choral ability, I was ill-suited to this, because, then as now, I can't sing and I generally lean towards a more despair-based approach to life. I commend that outlook to Gareth Malone, whose evangelical belief in the ability of a rendition of "Walking on Sunshine" to dissolve life's miseries is as stupendously doomed as the giant panda's chances of survival. Happy new year.