Alan Beattie's How Each Nation Sinks or Swims is the original source of this quote.

I like Jack Ewing's review:

Giant pandas are "incompetent, inefficient, piebald buffoons" that should be allowed to "die out."

Giant pandas evolved to depend exclusively on marginally nutritious bamboo. In economic terms, they're "path dependent" — locked into a situation that limits them.

Beattie admires cats, who gave up their free-roaming ways to carve out a niche hunting rats and snuggling with humans.

Sometimes cats snuggle with teddy bears instead.